Transcripts V

119. A Werewolf Craze Leads to Torture and Executions, Western Europe 16th-17th centuries

Anne Brannen  0:00 

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:30 

And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:32 

This is our Halloween episode. We like to do that, and we always have to figure out a Halloween episode. And Michelle figured this one out. She said there was a werewolf craze in the late Middle Ages. Okay, fine, we’ll do that. So that’s what we’re doing, although it turned out to be kind of bigger than that, as often happens to us. So we’re focusing down on the fact that a lot of people were accused of being werewolves in Western Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. That’s our topic. Happy Halloween. So werewolves had been known to exist certainly since ancient Greece. Herodotus tells us that there’s a tribe in Scythia that could turn themselves into wolves and then back again, that being kind of key for the idea of being a werewolf. You’re a human who becomes a wolf. The early Christians knew about them. But werewolves in Western Europe became more common in the Middle Ages. People knew about them more. There’s more writing about them. Apparently, a lot of people were seeing other humans turn into wolves, and so they wrote all this down. In general, werewolves were good, though there were some exceptions. You know, sometimes werewolves were just fine. Mostly, this was in fiction like Bisclavret. In Bisclavret, there’s a werewolf who’s really very genteel and lovely, and the only people he kills are his wife and her new husband, and that’s because his wife is the person that stole his clothes, and then he had to stay a werewolf and he couldn’t change. Really, basically, it was revenge, justified revenge, and also he was a king, and so, so that’s really different. Also it wasn’t really about a human. It was fiction. We’re assuming here that the people who actually turn into werewolves are not fiction. These were historical accounts, but Bisclavet was a romance, so we’re not counting that. The werewolf trial craze in the late medieval, early modern era, completely not by coincidence, happened at the same time as the witch trials. They totally connected these two things. So as usual, we asked, What the hell? What happened? How did we get here? I now will tell you things I found out. We want to remember that there actually are wolves. I mean, not just in fiction and romance and pieces of historical chronicles that we maybe don’t buy. Michelle, do you believe that there were a lot of humans who saw other humans turn into wolves in the Middle Ages?

Michelle Butler  3:01 

I think that the 16th century is a wild and wooly place. The 16th century is also when the Dancing Plague that we covered–

Anne Brannen  3:10 

Yeah, where people had to dance for a year and a half or something. The Middle Ages were very exciting time. Okay, well, I’ll just say I do not actually believe that any humans were turning into wolves. I’m just telling you that I don’t think so. So we don’t buy that, but we’re understanding that some humans thought this was true. But there were also wolves. I do believe there were wolves, and I’m not even going to ask if Michelle believes there were wolves. We think there were wolves. Until modern times, actual real wolves, the ones that didn’t turn into humans, they were just wolves, and they were a real problem for the Europeans, and more recent times too. But I’m going to get to that later. Obviously, they’re an economic problem because they attacked livestock. They attacked livestock whenever they could, because that’s a really, really good thing to eat. You’ve got a bunch of sheep altogether. There’s a little lamb. You just pick it off. If the giant mountain dogs don’t pull you down, you’re doing really well. So the wolves have been a problem since the humans started becoming shepherds. But in the Middle Ages, they weren’t thinking about the wolves as evil. They were just natural predators that wanted to eat the sheep. Very different things. That was going to change with Christianity, obviously metaphorically, because Christ is the Good Shepherd, and so therefore anything that’s attacking the flock, which would be the humans, is obviously allied with the devil. So therefore wolves are demonic. But wolves were also fearsome, not just economic problems, because wolves didn’t then, and they still don’t, generally attack humans. Humans are not good prey. Humans, for one thing off, they often fight back and yell and scream and get other people. We are not natural wolf prey. But we become wolf prey in certain kinds of situations, if wolves are driven by famine or if they’re rabid. Most of the wolf attacks, most of the wolf attacks, throughout Europe, throughout the centuries, were rabid wolves, of course. Wolves will also scavenge, you know, if you’ve got a bunch of dead bodies laying around, let’s say, for instance, if you’ve got a famine or plague or war, wolves will do that. When the wolves do attack humans, unless they’re rabid, in which case their minds are gone, because your neurological system goes–regular wolves, if they are feeling like they need to attack the humans, they generally will go for the children and the elderly or the ill or people that are walking around, not moving too fast and stuff. They just are not our natural big enemies, but they’re really scary. So there were more wolf attacks in the middle ages than there are now, obviously, because, for one thing, there were more wolves. A lot more wolves. And also, there were larger areas with not strong human population. Wolves were much more likely to attack in the country than they are the city, although Paris will come into this in a minute. As a matter of fact, although there are still wolves in Europe, there are none in the British Isles. In England, they were eradicated by the 15th century. So if you’ve got werewolves in England, you really are moving on out into fiction land, because there’s no wolves there at all. France had the largest wolf population in Europe and some of the most famous wolf attacks. In the winter of 1419 to 1420, for instance, France was suffering the effects of the 100 Years War, which was always fought in France and not in England. They had been in war. There was a famine. It was extremely cold. It was so cold that the river froze in Paris. There was lots and lots of snow. The English were occupying Paris, as a matter of fact, at that point, and the wolves were also hungry because of the winter, and packs of wolves started to come into the city. So that was very exciting. Two years later, it happened again. The wolves were attacking the vulnerable people who got in the way while they were trying to dig up people in the graveyards. But it was scary. There were packs of wolves. The worst of the French wolf attacks were in the 1450s, when also it was cold again, and cold and famine pushed wolf packs, several wolf packs, to attack farms and the Parisian suburbs. In Franconia, in 1271 there were 30 people killed by a pack of rabid wolves. A pack.

Michelle Butler  7:41 

Wow.

Anne Brannen  7:41 

And it makes sense, because you know, they’re all getting rabies, and so then they come into your city and attack you. I don’t know to what extent they eat you. They’re nuts, they’ve got rabies. Nearly 200 people were killed near Versailles. From 1677 to 1683 there was a bunch of rabid wolves around Versailles. So the big attacks were not common. These were things that happened occasionally, but they were really, really dramatic, and they were very, very well remembered, which is why we still talk about them. The wolf packs of Paris. We know about all this. So smaller attacks by single wolves or smaller packs, that’s just going on throughout Europe through the Middle Ages and on into the 18th century. Hence the focus on wolves as scary, powerful, dangerous beasts. But werewolves, that is a different matter. And so there’s some theories, of course. There’s a bunch of theories about werewolves. Where does this idea come from? One of the ones I find interesting–I don’t know how far this will take us–but one theory is that it’s the rabies. You can’t cure rabies. We can’t cure rabies, but we can treat it if we catch it before there’s any symptoms, but that wasn’t until 1885. So until then, if you were bit by any kind of rabid animal and you didn’t die from it, you went on to exhibit symptoms of rabies until you did die. The neurological system goes and so some of them involve frothing in the mouth and becoming completely beastly. I remember my father telling me, I don’t know whether they caught it too late or it’s just that they were out in rural East Texas and they couldn’t do anything about it. But my father remembers a neighbor being tied to a tree who had been bit so that he wouldn’t hurt anybody, until finally he died, and made a big impression on that East texas child, because he was still telling that story. So that must have been in the late 20s, late 1920s.

Michelle Butler  9:33 

That would make an impression.

Anne Brannen  9:35 

Yeah, you wouldn’t forget that, would you? And you can’t have people with rabies hanging around the children. You just can’t. You know, I wasn’t even there, and that story’s haunted me all my life. Another theory about where this idea of the werewolf comes from is the shape shifters. Because shape shifting is common throughout mythologies of the pagans that were in Europe. Shape shifting in various forms, you know, into ravens and to bears and certainly into wolves. There’s an idea that comes on down into the idea of the werewolf, that there’s foundationally a kind of shape shifting. And then there’s also a kind of explanation. Sometimes you find bodies and they’ve been kind of torn apart. There’s an explanation. People did it, only they were being wolves. I find that myself not a very good explanation, but then I have probably been ruined by the industrial revolution. In Nordic tribes–and this is important for a lot of reasons, it’s gonna come in later so remember this part–in Norse culture, the wolf was really important. It wasn’t just a dangerous kind of thing. It was powerful, and one is to respect it. Odin has two wolves that follow him around, Freyki and Geri. And so wolves are serving Odin, but the savage destruction of the wolf is also part of the mythology, because there’s the Fenris Wolf who’s going to be one of the horrors when the world ends at Ragnarok. You know, there’s a wolf that’s going to eat us all. So in the Norse culture, the wolves were really, really important mythologically, and held this kind of dual, large kind of position, not just as dangerous and going to eat you in the sheep, but as revered. So remember this part, because there’s also the Ulfhadnar, the wolf skinners. They were warriors who wore wolf pelts over the chain mail. We actually have medieval drawings of this, and they were Odin’s warriors. They fought in honor of Odin. And as warriors, they were very much like the berserkers, the men wearing the bear shirts. In other words, they’re taken by the characteristics of the wolves, and so they are very, very scary fighters, very scary indeed. So wolves: powerful, scary, dangerous. Occasionally, they attack humans, and some humans wear wolf pelts and then become powerful, scary and dangerous. Okay, summing up, summing up the wolves. Up to this point, the Roman church did not consider, for centuries, werewolves to be a problem of demonic evil. For centuries, they didn’t think this. The humans who thought that they were wolves might be being deceived by demons, but they weren’t really possessed by demons. Essentially, there weren’t any werewolves and anybody who thought this was being superstitious or deceived. If there aren’t really any werewolves, you don’t have to do much about them, do you? That was the church’s attitude toward witches too, until the late Middle Ages, and that’s when things started to change in the West–in the Roman church and in the West. In 1428 in Valais, Switzerland, several hundred people were accused of heresy and sorcery. That’s the first large scale witch hunt. Three hundred and sixty-seven people were executed, and several of them were accused of being werewolves, the first Western European law cases of accused werewolves. The accused were tortured during which they confessed. Confessed should be seen to be in little quotation things, because confession under torture, What the hell is that? They confessed to meeting with the devil. So you can see that there’s the shift. The werewolves were werewolves because they were sorcerers, witches, and they were meeting with the devil. Most of them were burnt at the stake, although some of the 367 people had their heads cut off instead. So the Werewolf Panic was a small part of the Witch Panic. The Witch Panic was much bigger. Between the 15th and the 18th century, there’s about 110,000 witch trials held throughout Western Europe, with maybe 40,000 to 60,000 people killed, and some of them were also accused of being werewolves. So that was the construction in Western Europe, that the werewolves were, like the witches, in league with the devil. I mean, sometimes the werewolves and the witches were the same thing, but that’s what was going on in Western Europe. There were, besides the witch trials that included werewolf trials, there were also just werewolf trials for just being specifically a werewolf, and not other things. There was sorceries involved. In 1521 three Frenchmen were tortured until they confessed to using a magic ointment to become wolves, and they got the ointment from the devil, thereby explaining a local wolf attack. So they got burned at the stake. In 1574 there was another Frenchman, Gilles Garnier, who was actually really, honestly a serial killer and a cannibal. When people found the bodies of children partly eaten, they assumed that a wolf was involved. Wouldn’t that only make sense, but they caught Garnier in the act, and he was a human, so he confessed–again, quotation marks–that a specter had given him, a kind of ghostlike thing had given him, an ointment that gave him wolf powers. He also got burned at the stake. In 1589, there was a German farmer Peter Stubbs or Stumpf, that Michelle is going to talk about much later. He was tortured and confessed to a deal with the devil which enabled him to become a wolf, and he got executed. And there are many details about the God awfulness by which he was executed, which I think Michelle gets to talk about, not me. And so I move on. So the werewolf craze of the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age was connected to the witch craze, but also had its own lines of inception and manifestation. But the craze itself was connected to the belief that deals were being made with the devil. As the witch craze was connected, and the torture and execution methods were the same. So if you’re like me, at this point, you’re wondering, okay, yeah, Germany, France, Switzerland, yeah, yeah, Western Europe. Was there a werewolf craze in Eastern Europe? Among the Slavs, shapeshifters were known most commonly to turn into wolves. This belief was most common in Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland, and in Ukraine, some of the Zaporozhian Cossacks were known to be able to transform into wolves called Kharakternyk. So a Cossack turned into a wolf is a Kharakternyk. And there’s a theory that this belief had kind of come on down from the Norseman who founded Kyivan Rus. Which sort of makes sense, doesn’t it just? Because doesn’t it sound like the Norse wolf fighters?

Michelle Butler  9:35 

Right, right, right. Yeah.

Anne Brannen  10:21 

By the way, currently, the Ukrainian official insignia for the Special Operations Forces is a werewolf head.

Michelle Butler  10:33 

Really?

Anne Brannen  10:35 

Yes, it is. And there’s a tribe–

Michelle Butler  11:34 

That is so cool. I ran across somewhere that Scandinavians who went to Constantinople and became the Varangian guard also took with them–I’m trying to find it right now–took with them a drama thing, where they dressed up like wolves. Yeah, here it is. Here it is. “The account of the Gothikon, referring to a group of Goths, widely interpreted as Scandinavians engaged in a militaristic dance wearing masks and animal skins for the emperor in Constantinople in the mid 10th century.”

Anne Brannen  12:12 

Jesus Christ.

Michelle Butler  12:12 

Isn’t that wild? It connects in with exactly what you’re talking about.

Anne Brannen  13:08 

It sure as hell does. Oh, I do love the Norsemen. I really do. Gotta go visit them some more. I want to say, though, about the Ukrainian use of the werewolf in their military formations, is that there’s a little problem, which is that one of the Nazi groups used the werewolf imagery, and there was a bunker in central Ukraine, actually, that was Hitler’s werewolf quarters. It’s not there anymore. They destroyed it, and you can go visit. There’s a park or something, but it’s not really there. So essentially, what’s going on– and it’s not like the Ukrainians don’t know this–essentially, what’s going on is that the Zaporozhian Cossack symbol is being reified, is being strengthened in face of the Nazi imagery. So I kind of like that. Oh, and I should mention that one of the Ukrainian movies I dearly love is  Maksym Osa: The Gold of Werewolf. If you go and you watch that which, you can–I forget where it is. Was it Netflix? I think it’s Netflix–there’s Cossacks and werewolves, or a thing which might be werewolves, yay. So, you know, you get it all together, and it’s a good damn movie, is what I say. So the werewolves in Eastern Europe were known to be created from sorcery, but they weren’t part of the witch craze. There were witch trials in Eastern Europe, but not very many. And the witch trials were Western, especially in German speaking countries. That’s where the largest, that’s where the preponderance was. There just weren’t that many witch trials in Eastern Europe and the Eastern Orthodox Church was not influenced by that whole devil- witch construct of the Roman church. It just simply didn’t buy into it. So you didn’t have the church giving you this connection of witches, why we have to get rid of witches, why we have to get rid of werewolves. They’re devil, devil, devil, devil. The Byzantine church is just simply not doing that.

Michelle Butler  14:13 

So they preserve that older approach.

Anne Brannen  15:07 

They did. They did not become nuts. I’m sure they became nuts in other ways, but not in this. So the witches were understood to be acting alone. They’re not part of this like vast demonic conspiracy, which the West became completely obsessed with. You know, King James the first–the one with the King James Bible, the Scotsman, was completely obsessed with witches, which is why the witch trials in Scotland started, where they were burning and not hanging like they were in England–did not believe in werewolves. Well, that’s stupid. He said, Yes, you can kill people for being witches, but not werewolves. Okay, fine.

Anne Brannen  14:17 

Guess you got to draw the line somewhere.

Anne Brannen  15:50 

He was not so good at drawing the lines. There were no werewolf trials in Eastern Europe. They just weren’t there. And also in Eastern Europe, werewolves were not associated with witches. They were connected to vampires.

Michelle Butler  17:21 

Oooooh.

Anne Brannen  17:21 

Which I didn’t tell you. I didn’t tell you, because I didn’t know if you were gonna find it, but I was just waiting.

Michelle Butler  17:21 

That makes a few things I found make more sense.

Anne Brannen  17:21 

There’s a word–vrykolakas–and it means both werewolf and vampire. Same thing.

Michelle Butler  17:21 

Interesting.

Anne Brannen  17:21 

Vampires could turn into werewolves. Werewolves might become vampires when they died, there’s like, not really a line in between them, the revenants and the werewolves. In Western Europe, there’s later going to be a vampire craze. In the early 18th century, Western Europeans became convinced that they were under attack by vampires from Eastern Europe. You know, you know, Michelle, I know that you and I cannot help being descended from the Western Europeans, but sometimes I’m just sorry about it, don’t you know? I don’t know. Maybe we should call this 1000 years of stupidity. Okay, the vampires were not attacking the Western Europeans, I’m just saying. I wanted to know–I asked some Ukrainians I know if, if they had inherited this connection of vampires and werewolves. And what I was told is that, well, vampires, the vampires we know, are Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the American movies. Yeah, so it hasn’t really–it’s not–you know, we’re kind of ubiquitous over in America. We make movies and stuff, and they apparently infect the entire planet. So the West got the vampires from the east, that’s where we got vampires, and then we broke the werewolf connection as it had existed, and then we sent the vampires back East.

Michelle Butler  18:14 

Okay.

Anne Brannen  18:14 

Oh, my God, I did have fun with this, I will say. Okay, so now there’s the question. So what happened? What happened? As I said, there were no werewolf trials in Eastern Europe. The last werewolf trials in Western Europe were early 18th century.

Michelle Butler  18:31 

That is mind boggling.

Anne Brannen  18:31 

Yeah, I like it that the Enlightenment made everything not dark. The last witch trial In Western Europe was in Glarus, Switzerland in 1782. Anna Goldi was executed. The last witch trial in Eastern Europe was in 1811. Barbara Zdunk was burnt at the stake for arson, like she caused it by sorcery, apparently. So she got killed. So there were witch trials in Eastern Europe, but not many, and they were later than the Western, like the West infected Eastern Europe with the witch trials, I don’t know. Not that many and very and much later. I want to come into contemporary times. In World War One, the Russians and the Germans had several temporary truces because the soldiers were being attacked by wolves. The wolves themselves had been displaced by trenches, artillery and troop movements, and they were starving, so they ate the wounded, the dead, and the lone sentries. So the two sides would call a truce. They would hunt down the local wolves, and then they would start killing each other again. Humans. And one more thing, another one of my Ukrainians told me. These days, in that territory in Ukraine, where things have been evacuated, everything’s getting bombed out–that’s the gray area–this is going on again, but it’s the abandoned dogs. They used to live with humans, and now they’re starving, and so they eat the corpses.

Michelle Butler  21:58 

Oh, great. I think I may have mentioned before that this is still a problem on contemporary farms.

Anne Brannen  21:58 

The eating of sheep or the eating of dead people?

Michelle Butler  21:58 

Not the dead people, but–

Anne Brannen  21:58 

Oh, good.

Michelle Butler  21:58 

–but the wild dogs.

Anne Brannen  21:58 

Oh, the wild dogs.

Michelle Butler  21:58 

Joining up into bands and then docking the livestock.

Anne Brannen  22:44 

Yes, that’s true in rural New Mexico too, absolutely.

Michelle Butler  22:49 

When I was a kid and still now–I mean, my brother still has to worry about this–you have a dog because you need somebody to bark the coyotes off. So it’s coyotes, not wolves, but you’re in the same ballpark. When people bring a dog out to country and boot it out, if you get more than two or three of them, they form a pack and start pulling down your livestock. And then you have no choice but to start shooting. Because it’s not like you’re going to be able to trap them and take them to the pound. And a calf when it hits the ground is worth–well, 15 years ago, it was worth $400 so I have no idea what it’s worth now, but you can’t afford to have packs of wild dogs making off with a newborn calf.

Anne Brannen  25:26 

No, it’s your livelihood. Well, Michelle, that was what I have on werewolves. And I’m really, really, really glad that it occurred to me to wonder what the hell was going on over on the other side of Europe. Because when you when you look all this stuff up, it doesn’t say Western Europe. It always says Europe. It’s Western Europe. It is not Europe.

Michelle Butler  25:47 

I found a little bit of that distinction between East and West.

Anne Brannen  25:52 

very little. So anybody who does say it, yay them.

Michelle Butler  25:57 

I found some of it, but I didn’t dig into that a lot. I found really quickly, like you did, that this was an unexpectedly large topic. I really thought that I had done okay this time, and found a relatively focused topic, because the numbers you were throwing out before, about the number of people accused was in the hundreds, and the number of people accused and tried of witchcraft is in 10s of 1000s so I thought, okay, this is manageable. Oh, my god. It’s so huge. So I focused on one specific but extremely well known example from 1589, in Germany. So this is Peter Stump, who is probably in the wider culture, since the 16th century, the best known example of someone executed as a werewolf. He was born, most likely, around 1530 and most likely near Bedberg, Germany, because later he’s called the Werewolf of Bedberg. So that’s why we think he probably was from that area. And interestingly, unlike many other victims who are accused of these kind of things, he was well off.

Anne Brannen  27:03 

Oh, really, I didn’t know that.

Michelle Butler  27:05 

He was a prosperous, well to do farmer, a widower with a couple kids and a mistress. I mean, I do not know, because there’s no way to tell who he annoyed that they literally sicced the dogs on him, but oh my gosh, he must have annoyed somebody. This guy was part of society. He was part of the community. Under torture–not surprisingly–he confessed to having practiced magic since age 12, and that the devil had given him a girdle which allowed him to transform into a large wolf. This is actually–sidebar: one of the things that’s pretty interesting about these different accounts, the technique for becoming the werewolf changes. Sometimes it’s the ointment, like you were talking about. Often it’s a girdle or a belt, or sometime a ring.

Anne Brannen  27:55 

Oh, I hadn’t seen the ring.

Michelle Butler  27:57 

That one’s much, much rarer. This one, I saw a lot, the girdle. The devil gives you this thing that…or a belt that can turn you into a large wolf, and then, if you take it off, it returns you to human. It is interesting to see how the pieces of werewolf mythology that we think of as being very central to the concept are not present.

Anne Brannen  28:20 

No, they don’t actually show up till the 19th century.

Michelle Butler  28:24 

In modern 20th and 21st century concept, it’s not something you can control. It’s something that happens to you under the full moon, but this is something that people can consciously do and undo. So now they just start throwing the book at–oh, I missed a piece. He confessed to having practiced magic since age 12, and that the devil had given him a girdle which allowed him transform into a large wolf. Taking it off would return him to human. This part is really awesome. He claimed to have hidden it and told them where he had hidden it. But wouldn’t you know it, it wasn’t found there.

Anne Brannen  28:57 

Ha! Really.

Michelle Butler  28:58 

I know it’s a shock, big old shock, that they sent people out to look for it and they didn’t come back with it. He was accused of killing many animals–goats, sheep, mostly small animals. So I guess there’s some kind of reality. Over the course of 25 years, he’s accused of killing people, including two pregnant women whose babies he’s supposed to have ripped out and eaten.

Anne Brannen  29:21 

Oh god.

Michelle Butler  29:21 

So he’s accused of cannibalism. He’s accused of killing his own son when he was in wolf form and eating his brain. So that part kind of was interesting, because that’s something we associate with an entirely different supernatural concept, the zombies.

Anne Brannen  29:40 

Right, right, right.

Michelle Butler  29:41 

He’s accused of incest with his daughter and a cousin, both of whom were executed with him.

Anne Brannen  29:48 

Oh no, oh no.

Michelle Butler  29:51 

This piece is really intriguing. He was executed on October 31–

Anne Brannen  29:57 

Oh was he then.

Michelle Butler  29:57 

1589, and they picked that date on purpose.

Anne Brannen  30:00 

Did they? Huh. 

Michelle Butler  30:01 

They did. He was executed very, very nastily. I’m not actually going to go through the details, because it’s really, really bad. Feel free to Google that yourself if you want to, but I’m just going to tell you it was multi step, horrible, and lengthy in terms of time. It’s the kind of shit that only the 16th century comes up with.

Anne Brannen  30:21 

You and I have read about some terrible executions, and his is one of the worst.

Michelle Butler  30:27 

Yeah it’s in the top five. The wild extent of the accusations against him, as well as the abject brutality of the execution, is probably what made this event go the 16th century equivalent of instantly viral. Sidebar: one article I read said “despite its sensationalism or perhaps because of it, the execution of Peter Stump remained a singular event in medieval Europe.”  That stopped me, because, excuse me, we’re in 1589. 1589. It’s not–I mean, we are well into the early modern period. So this is another example–and we just covered Columbus, who is a good 100 years earlier, and yet everybody who talks about him wants to claim him as Renaissance or early modern, not medieval.

Anne Brannen  31:20 

I tell you, quite frankly, I think that the reason one would kind of naturally call this whole thing with Peter Stump ‘medieval’ is the connection of godawful things with the Middle Ages.

Michelle Butler  31:32 

Yes, yes, absolutely. This is another example of when you’re in that gray zone of the 15th and 16th century, it’s medieval when it’s bad and it’s early modern when it’s good.

Anne Brannen  31:43 

Yep.

Michelle Butler  31:44 

So this goes instantaneously viral. There is an English pamphlet published in 1590. He was executed at the end of October of 1589. It is instant, ripped from the presses, true crime, Law and Order: SVU. It is a really, really long title, but it’s usually referred now to as “The Damnable Life and Death of Stump, Peter.’ It claims to be a translation of an earlier pamphlet that was in high Dutch, but 19 pages–it’s longer than any other surviving pamphlet. It is undoubtedly lurid and almost certainly exaggerated, and God help us all, it is illustrated with woodcuts–

Anne Brannen  32:25 

Oh, right, right.

Michelle Butler  32:26 

–of both his crimes and his execution. We are horrible people.

Anne Brannen  32:31 

Really are.

Michelle Butler  32:32 

Because this is profoundly popular everywhere. If that High Dutch pamphlet existed, it doesn’t survive. There’s a bunch of German sources too. Obviously, you have both a pamphlet and a broadside published in Cologne. Also, very, very soon afterwards, broadsides were published in both Nuremberg and Ausburg. And then you have really, really—intriguingly, a city councilor in Cologne’s diary. His name was Herman Von Weinberg. This was not relevant in terms of the popularity of the story, the ways in which it became very well known very, very quickly, because it’s not like he sat down and this was the only thing he wrote about. There’s volumes, like four volumes of his personal diaries, and they were really only of interest to the family until the 19th century, when somebody else sat down to read them and published them and then realized, oh my goodness. So now it’s a really useful source, because he wrote about the execution contemporaneously. His account is really interesting because he’s really uncomfortable with it.

Anne Brannen  33:38 

Uh huh.

Michelle Butler  33:39 

He writes, this happened, but he’s using this really distancing, languaging. There’s a lot of passive and a lot of ‘it is said.’ So he’s being very cautious about not saying he doesn’t believe it, but he’s also not saying he does. He’s relating what happened, but not wanting to get on board. So it’s a very useful source, but it’s not part of spreading the story. But by 1612, so we are barely 20 years later, he has essentially become a watchword that you can just refer to, and everybody will know what you’re talking about. Samuel Rowlands published a collection called the Knave of Hearts. It’s a collection of satirical poems. This isn ‘t his first one. He had a different one, the Knave of Clubs, earlier, and he’s published several books of poetry. He wasn’t a super well known poet during his life, but he’s a really good source now for what the middle classes were interested in and what they were satirizing. In that collection of poems, he has this poem, ‘a German called Peter Stump, by charm of an enchanted girdle did much harm, transformed himself into a wolfish shape and in the woods did many years escape the hand of justice, till the hangman met him, and from a wolf did, with a halter, fet him.’ So he didn’t just talk about it, and it’s known. Peter Stump continues to have an enormous presence in pop culture. I’m going to go through it quickly, because there’s a bunch. In 2017 there was a book called The Wolf Trial by Neil McKay that is a historical novel that was published. This is the book that I found that is probably the most closely connected to Peter Stump. However, I did not read it. I read reviews of it, but it doesn’t sound like my cup of tea, so I didn’t read it, partially because you have descriptions like ‘a society still trapped in a medieval mindset.’

Anne Brannen  35:43 

Oh, no, that’s over, out the window with that book.

Michelle Butler  35:46 

The review from the Historical Novel Society talks quite a lot about how this is just a clunky treatment of the main character is rational and all the rest of these people are stupid, superstitious.

Anne Brannen  36:01 

Here’s Columbus teaching us all about the world is not flat.

Michelle Butler  36:06 

Yeah. So I passed on that, but I am including it so that everybody knows that in 2017 there was a book published about it. He has an interesting presence in video games, in young adult novels, in graphic novels. There’s one called the Werewolf of Bedberg that is a horror novel for young adults in which a group of teenagers attempt to summon the spirit of Peter Stump and that goes poorly. There are other ones in which he’s kind of tangentially referenced, like Deborah Harkness’, the second book in her Discovery of Witches series. Jonathan Mayberry’s Deep Pine trilogy has a reference. There’s a Doctor Who audio drama that references Peter Stump. It’s Loups-Garoux by Philip Martin, and it has the historical Peter Stump show up as a genuine werewolf who escaped his execution. There’s a movie, a 2023 thriller film, Torn, that has a main character named Peter Stump, who is wrestling with his demons, somewhat literally. None of the other ones that I found had this much of a presence, which is why I focused on this one. You can find bits and pieces, but this is the wide vein of werewolf trials continuing to be a presence in pop culture. Unsurprisingly, there is quite a lot of metal music.

Anne Brannen  37:29 

Who is that guy? Christopher…whatsit…is he doing–

Michelle Butler  37:33 

Christopher Lee.

Anne Brannen  37:34 

Is Christopher Lee doing any of it?

Michelle Butler  37:37 

You know, he didn’t show up, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.

Anne Brannen  37:41 

Christopher Lee, in the forefront of metal.

Michelle Butler  37:44 

There’s a US band named Macabre that in a 2003 released a album called Murder Metal, in which they have a song called The Werewolf of Bedberg Burke. 2017, a German punk horror band–I’m not actually sure what a punk horror band is, but I’m sure they know–called The Other also has a song called The Werewolf of Bedberg, and the album is called Casket Case. I loved finding out the name of the albums. That was 2017. The one I did actually listen to, because I could find the full song, is German band power Wolf. And this is a song called 1589 from Wake Up the Wicked album, and that was just released last year, 2024, and it is more or less a ballad that just tells the story.

Anne Brannen  38:37 

That’s amazing to me. So sometimes we’ll have a subject where we’ll go, oh, there’s going to be a lot of popular literature about this, and nobody’s writing. And other times I’m like, really the werewolf? this one werewolf trial has gone.

Michelle Butler  38:48 

I did not expect this. I was actually trying to find a little bit about several of the named ones, the ones where we actually had the name of the person who was accused. I was trying to find them. But it became very clear fairly quickly that this was the one that has become kind of the stand in for everybody. Other little bits and bobs that aren’t specifically related to Peter stump but I thought I wanted to share with you. There is a 2024 novel called Winter of the Wolf–that I did actually read–that is by Amanda Willicott. It is about a French werewolf trial from 1572.I was way more interested in reading this because of its description: “inspired by a notorious werewolf trial, blending history with paranormal and feminist themes and with a moving queer romance at its core, this is an unmistakable Australian debut.” This was way more up my personal alley, so I read that instead.

Anne Brannen  39:43 

That sounds great. Is it good?

Michelle Butler  39:46 

It’s a debut novel, so grade on a curve, and the audiobook is kind of wild, because you have an Australian narrator doing what they’re kind of thinking is 16th Century French accents. So that’s entertaining. But yeah, I did enjoy the book.

Anne Brannen  40:02 

A winner. We have a winner.

Michelle Butler  40:03 

I’m almost certain I enjoyed it more than I would have The Wolf Trial, which would have just made me mad the whole time. The other little piece of fun I have for you is that John Steinbeck has an unpublished novel called Murder at Full Moon, from 1930. It’s one of his early books. It never was published, but he also didn’t burn it. He had written three unpublished novels, and he burnt the other two. So this one, he didn’t try to publish again, but he also didn’t burn it. It is a mystery novel about a series of killings that happen during full moons, and there is a rumor that it’s being done by a werewolf. I am flabbergasted to discover this.

Anne Brannen  40:47 

I’m guessing that maybe, if I was someone who studied 20th Century American literature, I might have heard of this, but I’m not, and I hadn’t, and I’m really quite stunned by this.

Michelle Butler  41:00 

The John Steinbeck estate has decided it’s not going to be published, but it is available. If anybody wants to go look at it, it is in his archives.

Anne Brannen  41:09 

So not online. But you could go and read it.

Michelle Butler  41:13 

Let me check. I believe you have to go look at it. It’s called–what the hell? Murder at Full Moon–I love the title. So yes, the estate has decided that they’re not going to print it. There is a certain amount of arguing about that. It’s not a secret, exactly. There was a discussion. “In a separate statement, the company said it was wrong to consider Murder at Full Moon a lost work, since academics have been able to study it for years. The novel, written under the pseudonym Peter Pym, is located at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Anne Brannen  41:44 

Okay, so you don’t have to go to California. You can go to Austin.

Michelle Butler  41:47 

Yeah, you can go see it if one wanted to, and they’ll let you, but they’re not going to publish it. I just thought that was wild, because, you know, John Steinbeck is Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, this really gritty, utterly realistic American, and so for him to write this werewolf adjacent mystery novel– one of the other reviews of it kind of objects to the idea of calling it a werewolf novel, because that’s just one of the rumors. It’s not actually what turns out to be, but it’s werewolf adjacent. I mean, really, if you, if you write a book in which people and creatures are being killed during the full moon, and there’s rumors going around that it’s being done by a werewolf, just because you end up in the Scooby Doo land of, it was the human after all, does not mean it’s not werewolf adjacent, because you are tapping into that.

Anne Brannen  42:39 

Fair enough. Fair enough. I think I would say then that, using that language, that Maxsym Osa is also werewolf adjacent. You could have werewolves and they could be werewolf adjacent.

Michelle Butler  42:51 

And that is one of the problems. This isn’t a singular concept. It arises in different places and then has different pieces associated with it. But I found this topic to be fascinating.

Anne Brannen  43:06 

I had so much fun. I really did.

Michelle Butler  43:09 

I don’t know why I find it more incredible that people were accused of being werewolves and then eating other people while they’re transformed. Why is that less credible than accusing people of being witches and, oh, you’ve ruined the crops and spoiled the milk and killed the babies. But it is.

Anne Brannen  43:28 

I learned a lot with this, and I just loved it because I had not known. I mean, I thought I knew the witch trials very well. I did not know about the werewolf connection.

Michelle Butler  43:38 

I did not either, which is why, when I ran across it, I thought, we got to put this on our list.

Anne Brannen  43:42 

And I had not known, certainly had not known, about the difference between eastern and western werewolves.

Michelle Butler  43:49 

That was really interesting too. I also did not know that.

Anne Brannen  43:54 

And also Zaporozhian Cossacks got involved, and I love them very much. So I enjoyed this a lot. Well. So there we are. That’s our Happy Halloween werewolf episode. We learned a lot. The next time that you hear from us, we are going to go to Paris again, only there’s no wolves involved that I know of, and it’s much earlier, 845, but there will be Vikings. I don’t think they’re the werewolf Vikings, but the Vikings are going to besiege Paris, and so we’re going to talk about that.

Michelle Butler  44:23 

Awesome.

Anne Brannen  44:24 

That’ll be fun. So this has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. You can find us on Spotify and Apple podcasts, all the places where the podcasts are hanging out. You can find us directly at True Crime Medieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. There are links to the podcast and to show notes and the transcripts, and there’s a three part index now where you can look things up by the names of the title, more or less. And the subject, more or less, and where things were, more or less. I really like my index, any kind of index, where one of your categories is dysfunctional families. Like in your family did the daughter try to kill her daddy with a crossbow? Because that’s dysfunctional. I’m just telling you. You can leave comments for us. We like that. And you can also, if you’re commenting, you can tell us about if there’s any medieval crimes that you know of that you’d like to make sure we have on our list. If they aren’t on the list already, we usually put them on. We go, Ooh, that’s nice. Do I say anything else at this time? I can’t remember.

Michelle Butler  45:44 

I don’t think so.

Anne Brannen  45:45 

I don’t think so either. Bye.

Michelle Butler  45:46 

Bye.

118. Henry V Orders the French Prisoners Killed, Agincourt, France October 25 1415

Anne Brannen  0:23 

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:33 

And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:36 

Today, in honor of St Crispin’s, this is two Crispins, the Saints Crispin’s day, which is October 25, we want to talk about that time at the Battle of Agincourt when Henry the Fifth commanded the French prisoners to be killed. Because that was not technically a war crime at the time, although it would be now, but it wasn’t thought highly of. But, well, I’ll talk about that later. The Saints Crispins were a couple of noble Romans. They were brothers, they made shoes, and they were missionaries, and they got martyred in about the year 286, and so that’s who they were. Didn’t have anything to do with Agincourt or battles or English or anything. It was just that day that just happened to be when the battle was so, it’s St Crispin’s day, and the English slaughtered the French at Agincourt, and Henry ordered the French prisoners to be killed. It wasn’t a war crime, but besides being something that really was morally questionable at the time, no kidding, it also had economic ramifications, because you could hold your prisoners for ransom, and then their lords or their families or whatever would give you the money. And so actually was a big economic deal for people who had captured French prisoners, or to whom the French had surrendered. You can’t get ransom for dead people. And so there was that. So the question is, how did we get here? How did we get to killing the French prisoners? I will tell you. And I’m very happy to do this because I love to think about the Battle of Agincourt, on account of John Keegan, and who I totally recommend. The Face of Battle, an excellent book looking at three battles, Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme, from the point of view of soldiers. It was a landmark in military history and I love that book. At any rate, Agincourt is in there. The Battle of Agincourt occurred at the end of the campaigning season. Because, you know, winter is hard for military companies to take their infantry all around, even if you’re not actually trying to get to Moscow in the middle of the winter. The winter is hard. In Henry the fifth’s piece of the 100 Years War, which is this thing that lasted from 1357 to 1453, where there were actually intermittent wars, but all about the same thing between England and France.The 100 Years War had started from the ending of the royal Capetian line in France, which direct line ended with the death of Philip the fourth on account of the Tour de Nesle affair, which we did a podcast about that I dearly love, where we explained what happened to Philip the fourth’s line, which is that his daughters in law had affairs with Norman knights, and everybody got either imprisoned or executed, and then there was only a girl surviving, and that was a problem for the French, plus she might have been illegitimate. Who knew, everybody was sleeping around, it was hard to tell. The French wanted to keep the throne in male hands. So it didn’t go to Joan, who was a child of Philip’s son, Louis, and so his grandchild–Phillip’s grandchild–might have been illegitimate, although really it just didn’t matter. Basically, they didn’t want a woman. And the thing was, everybody was suspect. And here’s the deal–there was another child of Phillip’s who had not been having affairs, and indeed had actually exposed the affairs to her father, so that everybody could get in trouble. But that was Isabella. She was female. She was married to Edward the second, the King of England. If you were going to be having female heirs, you could have gone to her, to her child, who would end up being Edward the third of England. But if you didn’t want women, you had to do something altogether. Before all of this, we’ve gotten into it because the Norman French–that’s the French Vikings, as you know–had conquered England in 1066, and the Norman rulers and nobility in England obviously held large portions of France, because that’s where they came from. So there were people in England who were ruling England, who actually owned a bunch of France, and then Henry the second afterwards–what, 150 years later–had married Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152 and she was Duchess of Aquitaine, which is this vast portion of southeastern France, and Henry himself ruled Normandy, Anjou, Brittany and Poitou. At that point, the English throne owned a lot of France, and when the English crown got to Edward the second–this is the guy married to Isabella, the daughter of Philip the fourth, whose sisters in law had disported themselves with the Norman knights–Isabella claimed the throne of France for her son, the future Edward the third, because he was the male descendant of Philip the fourth who was closest in blood. Okay. So you could stay with the male line, but only if you went through the girls. And the French weren’t happy about that. So the French barons ruled that Isabella had no right to make the claim, and also that the French crown had to go to a French native, rather than somebody who’d been born in England. At any rate, Edward the third, who is not getting the crown here, started the 100 Years War. That’s how we get to the 100 Years War. And he took some of France. Then there was the black death. Then the French King Charles the fifth gained most of the French lands that the English had conquered. Then in 1415, Henry started the third phase of the 100 Years War, because in 1414, there had been negotiations with the French they had started then. Henry said that he would give up his claims to the French throne if the French would give him Normandy, Anjou, Brittany, Flanders, and, of course, Aquitaine, and paid the ransom for the French king who had been captured by the English in 1356–still owe us some money–and also let him marry the daughter of the king, who was named Catherine, and give him a dowry for her of 2 million crowns. The French had a counter offer, which the English considered insulting, which was that he could have Catherine with a dowry of 600,000 crowns, and he could have Aquitaine, and they would make Aquitaine bigger. The English were not happy with that. And it was a kind of auspicious time for the English to re-attack the French, because Charles the sixth, the king, was mentally ill, and there was a French civil war going on between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians. This is going to be very important later. At the time that Henry invaded France, the Armagnacs held the throne. Okay. So in the campaign season of 1415–we’re now really in 1415–we were back behind for a while, now we’ve gotten to there–Henry first captured Harfleur. There was a siege between August 18 and September 22. The English had gunpowder. They were using that. It was the first time they used it against the walls in a siege. So, you know, they knocked holes in the wall. So there was that. They had 12 great guns to damage the town walls. The town surrendered, and the townspeople either swore allegiance to Henry or they left the city. By the way, during this entire time, the English were suffering from dysentery, and 2000 men in Henry’s force died. The dysentery becomes very important later, so that’s why I’m mentioning it. Otherwise, it’s just a thing that happened. But Henry left a small force garrisoned in the town to hold it and keep order and whatnot. What he wanted was to get his army to Calais, which was a port in–still is–a port in northern France that the English had been holding since 1347 and actually would continue to hold until 1558. That’s when that stopped. It’s right across from the White Cliffs of Dover. If you want to drive from England to France, you can take the car ferry from Dover to Calais, or you can take the Euro tunnel Le Shuttle from Folkestone to Calais. In other words, Calais is still the point in France that’s closest to England. So it was important then. It’s important now. Henry wanted to get there because he wanted to get back to England. The campaign season is ending, and also his army is getting sort of tired, although they’d done so well at Harfleur, and what he really wanted was to get the Dauphin to engage in battle. Also he wanted to show that he had a strong presence in France by, you know, by not leaving at Harfleur, by going down to Calais. But the French didn’t like this idea. So the French forced him to march away from Calais and blocked the Somm. Henry finally got across the Somme. He got across the river, but he had to march north. He was still blocked from Calais, so the French and the English forces finally got together in the same place. They were near the castle of Agincourt. There’s some argument about exactly what this is. But I should have mentioned this earlier, that what I know about the Battle of Agincourt is that the only thing we really know about the Agincourt is that the English won it. Everything else gets argued about. So take everything I tell you with a grain of salt. Somebody argues against it, I’m just saying. But. Any way. We think we know what our Agincourt is, but other people say we don’t, and they are very fine scholars, and so they may well be right. Agincourt itself, the castle of Agincourt, is gone now. I’m sorry. It’s like foundations. I don’t think they even have a tea room, but Michelle knows more about that. She’ll tell you later. The English were not in good shape. 2000 of them had died at Harfleur from dysentery. They still had dysentery. They hadn’t gotten over it. They’d been hard marching for like two and a half weeks, and they were exhausted. They were highly outnumbered by the French, and the French force was much better equipped, except in one way, which we get to later. They were hungry, they were badly supplied, and they were just like totally demoralized. But for Henry, there’s no real use in delaying the battle because he can’t get to Calais. If he’s going to get to Calais, he has to go through the French and he’s running out of time, because it’s not like his army is getting stronger while this is going on. No, no, they are not. Now then. The armies were very, very differently composed. 80% of the English force was made up of longbowmen. Did you know that it was 80%, Michelle?

Michelle Butler  11:17 

I don’t think Juliet Barker did the percentages like that. I knew that there were quite a lot of archers. She talks about how each company was comprised. I learned from her that the word ‘indent’ comes from this, to put yourself under something, because they all ‘indented’ themselves. So there are these, like indenture contracts. That was so cool. Between this and the one we did before. I’ve been really struck by how the legal and feudal language of the Middle Ages comes down to us in ways that we don’t realize, not just indented, but entitled comes to us.

Anne Brannen  11:59 

So she talks about the composition–does she say that the longbowmen were mostly Welsh?

Michelle Butler  12:04 

Yes, she talks about that, yeah.

Anne Brannen  12:06 

All right. She’s down with me then, all right, but we’re going to get to that in a minute. 80%. That is humongous. 80% of the English forces were longbowmen, and the longbow–now I get to talk about the longbow. That longbow that was used in England had come from either England or Wales. I think the oldest one we’ve found archeologically is from Shropshire, which actually, you know, is pretty close to Wales, but it’s the Welsh who developed their use as deadly weapons during their battles, when the Anglo Norman invasions, when the English–

Michelle Butler  12:43 

That makes a lot of sense, because they would be an excellent tool for the kind of guerrilla resistance that the Welsh were doing.

Anne Brannen  12:50 

Yes, that’s what it was, guerrilla warfare. And when the rebellion, when it pretty much died down, the Welsh archers came on into the English forces. So by and large, the longbowmen at Agincourt were Welsh. I don’t think it’s entirely, or perhaps even at all, coincidental that Owen Glendower’s Rebellion, the last of the great rebellions–that ends in 1415. The length of the longbows varied. It’s not like they were doing this on, you know, machinery, but they’re usually about between five and six feet, sometimes longer, and made out of yew, although you could use other hard wood, but yew is best for it. The yew trees started disappearing on account of this. The English/Welsh forces did not draw the bows using their arm alone. They press their whole body into the horn, which adds to the power of the shot. So they were not only having these giant bows, they were using them very differently. To be good at it, one trained first by playing archery games. You started when you were about eight. You trained from youth on bigger and longer and longer bows. But what that meant is that the arrows that were shot from the long bows of this particular army could pierce armor, which was getting stronger and stronger now, not from a long distance, but from the shorter distances they could pierce armor.

Michelle Butler  14:20 

I met an experimental archeologist at Kalamazoo who was a bowyer. In fact, he sells replica medieval war bows, so it’s one of the few material objects that I kept when I moved. Because I knew I wasn’t going to be teaching but I kept the replica war bow.

Anne Brannen  14:35 

Oh, dear heart.

Michelle Butler  14:38 

I know.  Medieval warbows are between 120 and 150 pound draw.

Anne Brannen  14:45 

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can’t do that unless you have built yourself up over decades, really.

Michelle Butler  14:51 

And it leaves archeologically distinctive marks on the body.

Anne Brannen  14:56 

Yes, yeah. We can tell who the longbowmen were if we find their bodies. Yeah.

Michelle Butler  15:01 

So he partnered with an ER doctor to do some really interesting experimental archeology. They dressed some ballistic gel in replica 15th century armor, and then they had Cameron and shoot at it with the sensors on the ballistic gel–

Anne Brannen  15:19 

He can draw the 150 pound bow?

Michelle Butler  15:21 

Yes, he’s a bowyer and an archer.

Anne Brannen  15:24 

Okay, so he’s done this a long, long time.

Michelle Butler  15:27 

Basically he shot it, and then the ER doc is like, yeah, so this is what would have happened to this dude. What they found is that it doesn’t even have to pierce the armor to incapacitate the person, because the G force–

Anne Brannen  15:40 

Oh, my God, of course. It’s like hitting your skull and your brain goes all around. You don’t have to break it to have a concussion.

Michelle Butler  15:49 

If you sustain a direct hit to the middle mass on your breastplate or against your abdomen, it’s likely to liquefy your spleen.

Anne Brannen  15:59 

God almight damn.

Michelle Butler  16:01 

It’s one of the most favorite things I’ve ever seen at Kalamazoo. Because that’s like, I understand why this is important instantly. I’m a huge fan of experimental archeology.

Anne Brannen  16:11 

The English were doing it. The French had archers, but they were crossbowmen and usual bows, they were not long bows.

Michelle Butler  16:18 

And those bodkin tip arrows they were using concentrates the force down to something that is about a quarter of an inch.

Anne Brannen  16:25 

Oh, God Almighty.

Michelle Butler  16:26 

If there is the slightest gap in the armor that it happens to hit, it will just skewer–you will end up with it coming out your back. But also concentrating 150 pounds of force onto a quarter of an inch, you really do some internal damage. I’m so freaking impressed.

Anne Brannen  16:45 

I love this. Thank you very much. No, I did not have this. The longbow would be replaced by musketry. I mean, finally, there would be something that replaced it, but not for a while, really. So the longbowmen were yeomen. They were commoners. Yeomen are the freeborn commoners, so they’re not nobles. They’re the guys who were playing around with longbows at the village games and hunting and whatnot. They were mostly Welsh, which the Welsh have not forgotten. The Welsh are really big on Agincourt. This is, as far as they’re concerned, this is a Welsh victory. I’m with them. Okay, I’m going to leave that now. But hey, Owen Glendower and the Welsh, I’m with them. Okay. Any rate, where am I? So 80% of the English forces are longbowmen, mostly from Wales. 20% of the army is made up of heavily armored Men at Arms. The longbowmen have no armor. You can’t do this. You have to be able to move your body. The Men at Arms were some on foot and some on horse, but they were all of them on foot for this battle. None of them were using their horses. Including the king. The French forces had a high number of heavily armed fighters, both on foot and on horseback, and they were using horses and foot soldiers at the battle. They also had arrows. They had a crossbowmen, archers, and gunners. They were all at the back. The longbowmen were a very powerful force, but they were vulnerable to a frontal attack by Men at Arms on horseback, which is what the French had in front–that would be a frontal attack. The English did not think that they were going to win this battle. The French did not think that they were that they were going to lose the battle. Nobody thought that the English could possibly win this battle. Their main force was very vulnerable to the French main force. However, some things happened. It rained very heavily the night before–like, really, really heavily. The battle, if it’s fought where we think it was fought, it was fought on a recently plowed field. This means mud. The English were demoralized, and they’d spent the night before the battle being really quiet so that they could hear if the French sent any little troops, which they did once, and then the English fought them back. But they were all quiet, and they were wet and cold also, and having dysentery and being hungry. I mentioned all these things. That’s the list of what I know was going on in the morning. The English ate up what they had left. They were still cold and wet, and they’re still not happy. The French ate breakfast and laughed and they sang, had fun because there was going to be a quick victory. They were just going to have some fun. The French were commanded more or less by a council because they could not agree to a leader. The King and the Dauphin weren’t there. I mean, the battle didn’t need them, and they didn’t need to put themselves in danger. There were several dukes, and all the Dukes are, they’re all big guns, and they completely outranked the military leaders who were not noble. So the Dukes ran things.

Michelle Butler  20:05 

I hadn’t really realized that connection with World War One.

Anne Brannen  20:09 

Yes. So the English were concerned with survival and the French were you know, just gonna kill some English and have some fun. The longbowmen, the commoners, were their best bet. Besides being most of what they had. The French were concerned with honor–having fun and honor. They’re really closely connected, actually. And for that, it really helps to be in the front, because you want to get prisoners and everything and kill people mightily, and so you have to get to them first before other people do. And this is all going to happen quickly. If you are behind, everybody’s going to be dead before you get there. You got to be in the front in order to get prisoners and kill the English and be all noble and go back to court and have people make much of you. And so therefore all the French leaders on horseback are in the front. All the guys on horseback are in the front because they don’t want the archers in the front because the archers are commoners who should not be getting honor. They’re in the back. This becomes very important later, but actually not too long later, because the whole thing only lasts about like two, three hours. The English used a formation that had been used before by the Romans to defeat Boudicca. We do not know if Henry actually knew about that formation, but he could. He could have known about it because he was a really big reader, and the formation was described by Tacitus. But we don’t know. We don’t know for sure if he knew this.

Michelle Butler  21:37 

But yeah, he read and spoke like four languages.

Anne Brannen  21:40 

Yeah, he was really not stupid. There are some stupid English kings. He’s not one of them. The formation looks like a saw blade. There’s a straight line of formation, which is where the the nobles are. The people who don’t have long bows, they’re all on the straight line. But the straight line is broken up by points that go on out to the front, that are created from the longbowmen. The longbowmen are in points, and the king is in the middle. The king is in the middle of the straight lines. And you can see that these are nobles, because they have banners, don’t they? They’re not on horses, but they have banners. This is also important. So the French, in attacking would find themselves in these narrow places, because they’re headed for the nobles, they’re headed for the nobility, so they’re going right on into, down through, these little bottleneck things toward the English, and the longbowmen are on either side of them. The English had put this saw blade line at the narrowest width of the field, if it’s the field that we think it is. There’s a dense woodland on either side, so you can get through there, but you get picked off. There’s really no real problem of the French coming through the undergrowth and whatnot on the other side, so they only need to cover that width, but it used their entire force. They don’t have a backup. They’ve got the line of the nobles. They’ve got the longbowmen. That’s, that’s what they’ve got. They don’t have a rear force, which the French do. Henry, now or earlier, at some point anyway, had failed to give the famous St Crispin’s Day speech that Shakespeare gave us. I’m so sorry. He did not say that or anything like that. What he called out was, ‘fellows, let us go on our journey.’ That’s all he said. So the English archers fired off a volley because the French were just standing there. The French were doing nothing. Why should they? They don’t need to fight. They’re just in the way. They’re going to go to lunch pretty soon. So the English fired off of volley, and after that, the French cavalry charged. They would have been terrifying, by the way, these guys in full armor, on horseback, with these banners, this whole line of them. They’re terrifying, although, if you are a Welsh longbowmen, although you have dysentery and you’re really hungry and cold, you are not afraid.

Michelle Butler  24:09 

Juliet Barker cites some sources that some of those archers had dysentery so bad that they just took off their trousers and their underwear.

Anne Brannen  24:20 

I love the Welsh because we really can think of some stuff. So there they were. They were just in bad shape, but they were doing what they had been doing since they were eight years old. The French cavalry charge. They were just terrifying, but they were fighting for survival too. The longbowmen fighting for survival adds a bunch of adrenaline. The French horses could not attack quickly. I mean, really, iif you’re attacking with this kind of cavalry, you want to go fast. They couldn’t do that. They couldn’t come fast. Because, you remember, that the heavily plowed field and the rain–the damn thing was a bog. The archers were unarmed, but they were standing behind these stakes, these pointed stakes that they had put into the ground, they had hammered into the ground, so they had a thing there. As the cavalry attacked, the archers opened fire with arrows that could pierce at close range. And not just that, the horses were vulnerable. The horses were going down, the horses and the riders fell in the mud. Being in the way, then, of the riders behind them, who then stumbled and whatnot, and then there were arrows, and they all had their visors down on account of the arrows, so they couldn’t see much. The armored men on foot that were coming behind them fell in the mud. They were wading through mud up to their knees, we’re told by the chronicler. The mud, of course, had been churned up by horses. So it wasn’t even just your regular mud bog. It was a churned up mud bog, and they had their visors down too because of arrows, so they didn’t know where they were going, and the archers way at the back couldn’t see anything, so they were doing their arrows. But it didn’t really matter. The nobles on horseback, naturally, were heading for the pieces of the line behind the points, because that’s where the banners were, and so that’s where more honor was available. That meant that they got to close range. They were in close range of the longbowmen as they got to the line.

Michelle Butler  26:13 

The estimates that I’ve read are that the archers get off half a million arrows in the first 10 minutes.

Anne Brannen  26:21 

I would believe that. They’re quick. They don’t just train on how to draw this thing–they draw it quickly, and they re-fire, yeah. So this is what I think. I think the guys on horseback with the banners and armor, that they looked really terrifying. But I think the longbowmen were a lot more terrifying really, even if they had dysentery. So the French outnumbered the English, as you know, and so occasionally they did break through. But then the English fought back, and as more of the forces came forward, the cavalry was stuck. They were really easy targets in between for the formations of longbowmen. When the longbowmen ran out of arrows, which they did do, they took up whatever they could find–staves, swords of the fallen, whatever, then they just slaughtered whoever they could reach. The English chaplain who witnessed the battle says that the piles of the French dead and crushed French because they sometimes you just got crushed before you died, for a while, you didn’t get hit. At any rate, the piles of the immobile French were so high that the English climbed on top of the piles to fight the adversaries behind them. And this went on for about three hours. 1000s of Frenchmen killed or taken as prisoners. King Henry had to take his household guard at one point to go save his brother, Humphrey, the Duke of Gloucester, because he got wounded in the groin, but they dragged Humphrey to safety. But it was catastrophic for the French. More than 100 of the high nobility were killed. More than 5000 knights and squires were killed, and over 2500 other dead Frenchmen who couldn’t be identified. The men of some noble families were completely wiped out. There’s like a generation of society leaders just simply gone. The English lost about 125 people. The worst of this for them being the Duke of York, Henry’s cousin. Of course, David Gam the Welshman was lost. We have a podcast on him too, and the Welshman do not consider him a hero. We explain why in that podcast. But we want to go back a bit to explain–because we do have to talk about our crime at some point–and we have to go back a bit for that. First, I want to go back to the French attack on the English supplies, which happened right after the battle began. A local lord, the Lord of Agincourt, led a force of about 600 peasants, and they attacked. They went behind everything, and they attacked the baggage train, and they stole a crown and a really fancy sword and a bunch of money. It was lightly protected. The English were really busy. In Shakespeare, the horror here is that the boys guarding the stuff were killed. This is not actually mentioned in the chronicles. The thing is that they stole some stuff. But I’m sure that the boys did get killed. I don’t think that Henry ran around with one of them in his arms, as he does in Branagh’s lovely movie. That’s very, very good movie but I don’t think that was going on. At any rate, that happened, and Henry may have known about this, and he may not have, we are not clear on this, but as the battle was coming to its conclusion–the pile of dead Frenchmen and the commoners stuck behind, hitting the Frenchman with sticks–some French forces at the rear tried to regroup, because they thought they could form another attack. They tried to regroup. They marched forward, but they didn’t pose any real problem. They weren’t going to be able to get to the front. For one thing, see piles of dead Frenchmen. Also mud, but they were fresh, and they were in formation. And Henry, who could not possibly have won this battle, you understand, became worried that they were going to find reinforcements from the back, from the rear of the English troops, in the form of the French prisoners. So he ordered that all of the French prisoners, except those of high rank, should be killed. Now this would, of course, be a war crime now, but it wasn’t really then, though it was morally questionable. The chronicles at the time don’t criticize the order and the battle, though we know it now to have been essentially over, hadn’t been called yet, and there were still more Frenchmen than English. If the new forces attacked, the rest of the French forces would probably get recharged and get all excited. So the fact that Henry sees this as a danger, even though it wasn’t, I myself, think, is absolutely what is the word for it?

Michelle Butler  31:03 

Reasonable?

Anne Brannen  31:06 

Thank you. I think it’s absolutely reasonable. He did not know that the thing he could not win was actually already won. He could not have known that. They didn’t have weapons, but they could certainly get some from the field. There were a bunch lying around. So he gave the order, and the Knights and the Men at Arms would not kill the prisoners because they considered it ignoble. So 200 of the archers did it. Okay, that I’m sorry about. It is the English that did it, Michelle, it wasn’t the Welsh.

Michelle Butler  31:35 

The English archers.

Anne Brannen  31:37 

English archers. Okay, all right, I’m sorry. We’ll get my chauvinism out of the way. There were 200 of the archers. We don’t know. They did it. And what they did was they cut the prisoners’ heads, because that’s only the thing they could reach, because everybody had armor on. If you had your visor down they stuck you through the eye. It was really cold blooded. And the prisoners were valuable. And the prisoners killed, even though they weren’t the highest ranking nobles, were nobles or gentlemen, and so to kill these people that you couldn’t get ransom for, really, really annoyed the English who had captured them. And the whole thing was unchivalrous, and this is an issue at the time. The blame, though, didn’t go to Henry, who had given the order, at least at that time, but to the military leaders who had gotten alarmed about the activities of the rear guard, the people who had advised him that stuff was going on. They got the blame, because Henry was right in this thinking, to order the killing of the prisoners who might well have regrouped and attacked the English. The rear guard fled the field, though; they didn’t really attack, because they weren’t really dangerous. And Henry rescinded the order, and all the prisoners did not get killed. At least 700 survived the massacre, and it might have been more. And that was the end of the battle. It was over. Henry went on to Calais, and he left France on the 16th of November, and he was a great hero in England. It was great. It’s easier for him to get money for military things after that. In France, the Armagnac forces had been decimated, and they were blamed for the catastrophe. You know, it was a council, but they were really important. 10 days after this battle, the Burgundians took Paris. There’s a museum in Agincourt that you can go to, though you can’t go get tea at the castle foundations. My dad says that the parking lot was full of English license plates and no French. One of the things also that Michelle was saying a minute ago was that three days after the battle, the French were still pulling live people out from under the these piles of corpses. Did I get that right?

Michelle Butler  33:49 

Yeah. I mean, that is just such a striking–it tells you so much about the scale of the catastrophe and the height of the piles of bodies.

Anne Brannen  34:04 

I have heard arguments about that in–I like to go to the military history sessions at the medieval conventions, even though I’m not a military historian, because I really like military history. And I’ve heard very, very fierce arguments about how high those piles really were. I have also seen two very fine scholars nearly come to blows over the question of how close the longbowmen were standing to each other at Agincourt.

Anne Brannen  34:31 

Interesting.

Anne Brannen  34:32 

You know them.

Michelle Butler  34:38 

Well, I think we should be passionate about our work.

Anne Brannen  34:40 

Well, yeah, everybody’s passionate about Agincourt. God knows I am, because I’m like, Oh, the Welsh. The Welsh. The Welsh did all this. The English had had a very great victory. So it looked at that point like the English were really going to get whole big swathes of France. The end of the 100 Years War. Henry died in 1422, and at the Siege of Orleans in 1429, Joan of Arc was in there, helping the French to win. And then there was the end to the French civil war. So therefore the Burgundians were no longer allies with the English. And after that, there were a whole bunch of English losses. 1429, 1450, 1453, that just ended the whole shebang. That was the end of the 100 Years War. England kept Calais, which it lost 100 years later in 1558. Well, what happened after that? I will tell you. What happened after that? This is the English and the French. The English and the French, over the centuries, were on opposite sides, same sides, opposite side, same sides. They went back and forth in wars, several wars. They were on opposite sides in the Italian war, 1494, to 1559. During the Reformation, England became Anglican, and French remained Catholic. After the English Civil War, Cromwell joined the French in the Franco Spanish War, the English allied with the French again against the Dutch Republic in 1672. From 1688 to 1697 they fought against each other in the war of the League of Augsburg. And then they fought from 1702 to 1718 in the war of Spanish Succession, and from 1746 to 1748 in the War of the Austrian secession. And there were wars from the 1740s to 1814 when England defeats Napoleon. What are they? These wars include in the Seven Years War from 1756 to 1763–pretty much all of Europe got involved in this–but France and England were on opposite sides. Finally, it ended with land exchanges. In 1763 the French sided with the Americans against the British when the War of Independence broke out. After the French executed their king in 1793, they declared war on Britain and invaded Ireland in 1798 to assist the rebellion that was being led by the United Irishmen. All of this ends in 1814 when Napoleon gets defeated at Waterloo. And so that’s all done. After that, after Napoleon, they never went to war again. They allied against Russia in the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856. They both decided not to help the Confederacy in the American Civil War. They worked together to build the Suez Canal. So I guess we can blame both of them for all of those things that are lost under the water. They were on the same side in World War One. Okay, let’s go there. France was invaded, but Britain fought against the Vichy government. The De Gaulle side is with Britain in World War Two, and now they are allied in support of Ukraine against the Russian invasion, although they are not fully at war, but sending money and arms and discussing what to do about the drones, which have now been going over–oh, what is it–Poland and Denmark and Norway. I forget where else. Even despite Brexit, despite Brexit, they are allied in many ways. Michelle, what did you talk about?

Michelle Butler  38:16 

So I found some interesting stuff. I know that will shock you. I tried to look at several recent scholars, just to get an idea of what they thought, because I found the thing that you were talking about earlier, where there was a mock trial in 2010 that indeed found Henry guilty of war crimes, which surprised me.

Anne Brannen  38:46 

I know because really, Ruth Ginsburg is was very, very intelligent.

Michelle Butler  38:51 

The recent historians that I read–Michael Livingston, Anne Curry and Juliet Barker–across the board, thought that it’s not a war crime. Michael Livingston is a military historian in particular. He works at the Citadel, and he talks about how Henry is allowed as the leader of the English–he’s not only allowed, he’s required to prioritize the lives of his soldiers over the prisoners. So he feels like the order was justified in that way, that if the French regroup, they’re gonna get wiped out to a man. He also just, by the by, in case anybody goes and looks at his book, he thinks that Agincourt the battle happened somewhere else.

Anne Brannen  39:34 

Like in some place near Agincourt?

Michelle Butler  39:36 

He thinks, you know, it’s that field over here, that rather than this field here.

Anne Brannen  39:40 

Okay, got it.

Michelle Butler  39:41 

Anne Curry thinks it’s not a war crime. She actually cites another battle in 1385 in which the exact same thing happens.

Anne Brannen  39:48 

Which battle is this? Do you remember?

Michelle Butler  39:50 

Aljubarrota. It’s the Spanish and the French fighting, and the side that has fewer, it looks like they’re winning, but then there’s a reversal, and does the same exact thing. She says, in that case also, the chroniclers don’t think it’s a war crime.

Anne Brannen  40:10 

What’s interesting to me about this is that from, you know, from the point of view of medieval military history, this is absolutely not a war crime, but it’s that it’s morally problematic that’s interesting to me, because if it’s not a war crime, why is it morally problematic? And I think the answer is that something is changing.

Michelle Butler  40:32 

Juliet Barker also thinks it’s not a war crime, but she also kind of talks about how none of the contemporary chroniclers talk about this as an attack in revenge for the baggage train. She doesn’t go into this in a lot of detail, but the implication is that switch happens later to make it more palatable for us. That changes when we get to Shakespeare. By the 1590s Shakespeare has Henry’s killing of the prisoners be an emotional decision that happens based on his anger because of the attack on the baggage train. He actually says–Shakespeare gives him the line, ‘I was not angry since I came to France until this instant.’

Anne Brannen  41:16 

Yep, something is changing.

Michelle Butler  41:19 

That suggests something really big is changing, because I think that for a medieval mind, that is less justifiable.

Anne Brannen  41:28 

Yeah, that makes no sense.

Michelle Butler  41:29 

That acting in anger, acting from emotion, rather than strategy, is not acceptable in the monarch. Making the decision to kill the prisoners as a military decision. Fine. We may not love the necessity, but we understand the necessity. So I think that’s just fascinating, that in that 200 years, you have this change where the emotional decision is acceptable, that revenge is acceptable, but not the kind of cold eyed military assessment ‘we could all get wiped out to a man, if we let them regroup.’

Anne Brannen  42:02 

I’m down for the cold eyed military assessment.

Michelle Butler  42:06 

I think that it’s fair, but I think that it tells us a great deal about how fast things are changing in those 200 years between the 15th century and the late 16th.

Anne Brannen  42:19 

So much changing.

Michelle Butler  42:20 

I know that there are people who want to argue–and we’ll get to Shakespeare–I know there are people who want to argue that Shakespeare’s play is all, like, secretly subversive, and he’s trying to make Henry look kind of bad. I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think that’s true.

Anne Brannen  42:35 

 I don’t think you have to be Olivier and Branagh to notice that he’s kind of heroic.

Michelle Butler  42:40 

I do not think that it is a secretly subversive play in which you’re supposed to think that Henry is actually a jerk. I’m sorry. I’m not here for that.

Anne Brannen  42:49 

No, me neither.

Michelle Butler  42:51 

So when Shakespeare gives him that line, you know, ‘I was not angry since I came to France until this instant,’ and that justifies killing all the prisoners, I think we’re supposed to as the audience, think that that does, in fact, justify the action, whereas I’m pretty sure that if that argument had been made back in 1415, medieval chroniclers would have said that’s a war crime. Acting out of emotion like that, and not military necessity would make it a war crime. But that didn’t actually occur to me until just now. I looked a lot at Agincourt in popular culture and how it feeds into the English sense of self. I am going to say right now that anybody who’s interested in that there is tons and tons and tons. I’m going to point you to two books in particular, because I cannot cover everything. By the by, Anne Curry has, I kid you not, three books on Agincourt, and they have very similar titles, and I’ve accidentally bought all three of them.

Anne Brannen  43:50 

Am I getting any of them in the mail pretty soon?

Michelle Butler  43:55 

I bought them on Kindle. There’s one that is about the battle itself. But then there’s this one, which is confusingly called Great Battles: Agincourt, which is actually about the afterlife of Agincourt as a concept. It’s from Oxford University Press. It’s 2015. It’s a great book. It gives you a little precis at the beginning of the battle and everything leading up to it, but the rest of the book is how it gets memorialized. Here’s what’s in the Chronicles. Here’s the poetry, and she goes through right after the battle until basically 2014. So that’s a really great book.

Anne Brannen  44:35 

That sounds wonderful.

Michelle Butler  44:37 

A second one that is doing something similar, but perhaps not in quite as much detail, is Stephen Cooper’s Agincourt: Myth and Reality. That’s Pen and Sword press, 2014. This often happens that you have books on the same scholarly topic that are clearly being written at the same time. For a book to be out in 2015 and one to be out in 2014, they were working on those at the same time. But it’s doing a similar thing. Steven Cooper’s book is going through and looking at the place of Agincourt in the English imagination itself. There is so much of this. There’s art, there’s poem, there’s plays, there’s novels, there’s songs.

Anne Brannen  45:21 

Is there an opera?

Michelle Butler  45:22 

I did not find an opera. I looked.

Anne Brannen  45:25 

Well, that’s bad.

Michelle Butler  45:27 

I did not find an opera. I did find this marvelous early 15th century song called the Agincourt Carol that I was fascinated by, because that is essentially a hymn. This is a song that has a refrain in Latin, but what it says is, ‘England give thanks to God for the victory.’ And then it has verses in English with some macaronic texts. The verses are in English, and they tell the story of Henry’s campaign in France.

Anne Brannen  46:00 

Oh, my. Harfleur?

Michelle Butler  46:03 

Yes. Let me go back over–I have this open…So you have the refrain, ‘deo gracias, Anglica, rede pro Victoria.’ Obviously it’s being repeated between these verses, ‘our King went forth to Normandy with grace and myth of chivalry. There God for him wrought marvelously, therefore England may call and cry, deo gracias.’  So we go through. The next verse is about the siege at Harfleur. The next one is about, oh man, he’s tried to go to Calais. He’s stuck at Agincourt. And the next verse is about, boy, there were a lot of French there. Then the next verse is, but God pulled through.

Anne Brannen  46:47 

By making mud.

Michelle Butler  46:50 

God helped out. ‘Almighty God, he keep our king, his people and all his weal welling, and he gave him grace without ending. Then we may call and safely sing, dea gracias.’ There is a video on YouTube of this being sung at the Tower of London in 2015 in commemoration of, I don’t remember, is that the 600th anniversary?

Anne Brannen  47:20 

Involves math. I don’t know.

Michelle Butler  47:22 

It’s a big anniversary, because it’s 2015, of the battle. So you have these three singers in 15th century clothing. It was delightful. And I will give you the link to that. It’s very easy to find on YouTube, if you want to just go look for it. Michael Drayton, I mention because he wrote not one, but two poems. Michael Drayton is a playwright who lives from 1563 to 1631, so he’s a younger contemporary of Shakespeare’s, and I wanted to include him because of the writing of two poems, which I thought was pretty wild. He wrote one called The Ballad of Agincourt, and that has its own, now famous first line, fair stood the wind for France. And then he later writes another poem called the Battle of Agincourt that is much longer, and has a different poetic structure. And here’s my favorite piece of it. It’s annotated.

Anne Brannen  48:21 

He annotates it?

Michelle Butler  48:22 

Yes. It has notes on the side in early 17th century English in which he explains the history he’s referencing. This, quite possibly, is my second favorite thing I found in my research, because I think that is amazing, and I’ve never seen anything like it.

Anne Brannen  48:39 

You’ll give us a link to that too.

Michelle Butler  48:44 

Most famously, of course, is Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth. You cannot overestimate-it’s not possible to overestimate the impact of this play, not just on our understanding of Agincourt, not just on how we see Henry. I don’t want to say historians are incapable of shaking off the influence of literature. I will say it’s very difficult. That must be even more difficult for English historians, because they’re even more steeped in the importance of Agincourt as a touchstone for English identity than we are, and trying to push through the version of Henry that is in the play, which is closer to reality than I thought. I figured Shakespeare was just making up the idea that Henry goes around at night in disguise and talks to his soldiers and cheers them up. Nope, apparently he did that frequently. There is contemporary attestation to that.

Anne Brannen  49:42 

Good lord.

Michelle Butler  49:44 

But the play has enormous impact, not just in keeping Agincourt and Henry in popular knowledge. It has phrases that have become completely detached from the play, that it is possible to use without knowing where they’re coming from. ‘Once more onto the breach.’ People can use that, and I have heard people use that, without knowing where it sources, in the same way that people can drop ‘Not all who wander are lost’ into conversation without knowing it’s from Lord of the Rings. I have seen that on merch that isn’t trying to be plagiarizing. They just don’t know. ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’ is another one of those phrases, and both of those phrases show up separately. So that’s kind of wild. You have the line itself, and then you have ‘we few, we happy few,’ and ‘band of brothers’ that also show up separately.

Anne Brannen  50:31 

Brothers is, you can use it as a title for a movie if you want.

Michelle Butler  50:35 

It’s humongous. ‘A little touch of Harry’ in the night is another one. It’s maybe not as big as the others, but I have also seen that floating around. In particular, I’ve seen it floating around as you can substitute something in for Harry. And so it’s a little bit of a word meme, in the same way, as ‘One does not simply walk into Mordor’ can be used where you substitute something out. The impact of the St Crispin Day speech is next level. It is not just a trope, it’s not just a phrase. It is a genre. It is everywhere. If you were to Google, as I did, lists of the most inspirational phrases that show up in movies, tons of them show up. They’re all alluding to the same St Crispian Day speech, and they’re not the same list of movies. It’s not like the same 15 movies show up on each list. It is more or less required at this point in movies in English, if there’s going to be a great big battle, the leader has to give an inspirational speech before the battle. And that is coming from this. It is known to be a genre. It’s called delivering your St Crispin Day speech.

Anne Brannen  51:54 

Well, I like this, and I like the fact that there was a St Crispin speech. ‘Fellows, let us go on our journey.’ That’s a very good St Crispin Day speech.

Michelle Butler  52:05 

I actually really like what Henry says there, because it reminds me–when I read that, I instantly thought of flight 93 and the ‘let’s roll.’ It reminds me instantly of that.

Anne Brannen  52:15 

And the use of fellows, the comradeship in it that Shakespeare then, you know, makes really, really big. It’s in there. Yeah, let’s roll. They knew they were gonna die.

Michelle Butler  52:29 

This is such a huge genre that one of these was added to the Return of King movie. Aragorn does not have a St Crispin’s Day speech in Return of the King in the book.

Anne Brannen  52:43 

Which Tolkien could have added, because he knows he knew Shakespeare.

Michelle Butler  52:47 

He certainly knows Shakespeare to the ground, because so much of Lord of the Rings is a reaction to Shakespeare. We see direct influence, you know, we see the impact of Macbeth, for example. So he knows that a St Crispin Day speech is a thing, but he also was in the First World War, and he knows it’s totally unrealistic, and his handling of battle scenes is deeply influenced by his actual war experience. And he, apparently, cannot make himself do it, but man is there one added. You know, ‘a day may come where the courage of men fails. But it is not this day.’

Anne Brannen  53:22 

It’s a good speech.

Michelle Butler  53:23 

It is, and that one itself is become its own meme. It is not this day. You can hear that anywhere, and they may or may not know that it is coming from the Lord of the Rings movie. My personal favorite St Crispin Day speech in a film is in a movie called Renaissance Man from 1994 that is about a bunch of army recruits who are not going to be allowed to continue and graduate from boot camp unless they pass this remedial English class. So they bring in a teacher to teach them literature. In particular, they have to pass the Shakespeare class. They have to have a basic grounding in literature or they just cannot graduate from boot camp. I don’t know if that’s realistic. That’s not the point.

Anne Brannen  54:12 

Probably not. It sounds like a good thing to make up.

Michelle Butler  54:15 

The drill sergeant thinks this is stupid, and so he’s constantly on them about still studying Shakespeare. Why do you have to study Shakespeare? What are you really learning? And finally, he has pushed one of these guys too far–a really, really kind of nerdy one who, why on earth is he in the army anyway? Because he looks terrified of everything at all times, and has these great big, thick glasses. But finally, the drill sergeant says to him…they’re out, they’re standing in the rain. They’re doing their drills in the rain, in the mud. How is Shakespeare gonna help you in a situation like this? And this recruit recites the St Crispin’s Day speech, And the rest of them now, they’re all inspired to put up with this nonsense. Because before this, they’ve been all, why do we have to do this, this is really stupid, and the drill sergeant’s, like, okay, I get it. I see it now. It’s my favorite. I love the meta-ness of it’s actually the St Crispian’s Day speech being used for this other thing.

Anne Brannen  55:25 

You’ll give us the link for that too, right?

Michelle Butler  55:27 

Sure. Yeah. Clips of it are on YouTube. This genre is now so pervasive and so overused that it’s appearing ironically and self aware. So for example, Pacific Rim, which is from 2013 has the character even as he’s delivering his inspirational St Crispian Day speech, saying, I know this is an inspirational St CrispianDay speech, but it’s working, right? It’s starting to show up ironically, but I love that piece too. We’re showing that we know this. We’re being self aware, and it’s accomplishing it anyway. You’ve already mentioned the really famous films. Olivier, and that film comes out six months after the invasion of Normandy. It’s a very clear and intentional effort to keep the English spirits up.

Anne Brannen  56:21 

I used to show the beginning of it and the beginning of Branagh’s to my students in the How to Read English Literature class to say, Okay, what’s going on here? Why do this?

Michelle Butler  56:32 

One of the articles I read talked about how much Churchill knew Shakespeare and knew Henry the Fifth in particular, and he–here’s the article. He deliberately echoes in his speeches pieces of Shakespeare. So this person is arguing that, for example, when Churchill says in one of his speeches, ‘never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,’ this scholar is arguing that that is an echo of Henry’s ‘we few, we happy few.’ This scholar is arguing that, particularly in those last years of the war, when everybody’s morale is so low, that Churchill is deliberately saying, dig deep guys, because we can do this. This is in our blood. In fact, this scholar quotes–let me find this particular quote. “For instance, in his retelling of the Agincourt campaign in the History of the English Speaking Peoples, Churchill says that”– okay, so now we have a quote within a quote, “‘Henry had to ascend the Somme to above Amiens by Boves and Corby, and could only cross at the Ford of Bethencourt. All of these names are well known to our generation.'” He is making the explicit connection between the Agincourt campaign and the invasion of Normandy, D-Day. Branagh’s film comes out after the Falkland war debacle. So the scholars, at least the ones I was finding, were arguing that his version is very much influenced by some cynicism about English military escapades internationally. I think there’s a piece of that that’s true, but I also think that ultimately, Branagh comes around to the exact same place that Olivier is. Henry is a hero.

Anne Brannen  58:19 

Of all the versions of the St Crispin’s speech that I’ve seen on film, it’s his that I like the best

Michelle Butler  58:27 

Branagh’s?

Anne Brannen  58:28 

Uh-huh.

Michelle Butler  58:28 

It’s excellent. I used to teach these two films to talk about conventions of realism, because Olivier’s has 1944 conventions of what realistic, what people in 1944 thought that was a realistic presentation of the Middle Ages. Branagh’s, this is 1987 (1989?), has that understanding that we’re still in, of what realistic means, what the middle ages should look like. We are still there. The Middle Ages are still muddy and dark and grungy.

Anne Brannen  59:14 

Okay, to be fair, I myself don’t think that all of the Middle Ages and all the places in the Middle Ages were muddy and dark. I do think that the recently plowed muddy field at Agincourt was muddy. I do think that.

Michelle Butler  59:28 

I think the Battle of Agincourt is lone of the few places you can make the argument that you actually should have that much mud in the Middle Ages.

Anne Brannen  59:38 

You cannot have enough mud in a film about Agincourt.

Michelle Butler  59:45 

So I have come to my favorite thing I found during my research, and it is tangentially connected to Agincourt, but I’m going to share it with you anyway, because it is fabulous.

Anne Brannen  59:59 

What you got?

Michelle Butler  59:59 

Maybe you’ve heard of this, and it’s not actually going to be a surprise for you–

Anne Brannen  1:00:04 

But you’re hoping it is.

Michelle Butler  1:00:05 

I’m hoping it is, because this is amazing. I am going to read a fairly long passage from Juliet Barker to contextualize it. We are talking about the impact–she’s talking about the impact of these continual wars on the common people of Normandy.

Anne Brannen  1:00:23 

Okay, good, thanks.

Michelle Butler  1:00:25 

“There was little that could be done to protect the country people, but this was an area that had been invaded and had suffered the depredations of war so many times that its inhabitants had long ago learned that their safety depended on their ability to disappear into local forests and caves. In some instances, caves provided a remarkably sophisticated refuge. At Noirs, just to the north of Amiens, subterranean chalk quarries had been artificially enlarged and used as places of safety for centuries. Working along the seams of chalk, which were sandwiched between layers of impenetrable silex–” So sidebar, I had to look this up. That’s slate.

Anne Brannen  1:01:09 

Oh, okay, I didn’t know that.

Michelle Butler  1:01:12 

–“an underground city had been created which was capable of sheltering up to 2000 people at once, together with their sheep, cattle, horses and mules. 28 galleries led to 300 chambers, each one large enough to house a family of eight, and a number of public rooms, including a chapel, a law court and a jail. Excavated at three different levels, between 101-140 feet below ground, the cave system was naturally dry, enjoyed a constant temperature of 48 degrees Fahrenheit, and had access to the river for water. Six chimneys provided ventilation and enabled food to be cooked. So that the smoke did not betray the presence of the people hiding below, the outlets were over 130 feet away, and two of the chimneys vented into local miller’s houses on top of the hill, giving the impression that the smoke came from their own domestic fireplaces.

Anne Brannen  1:02:16 

This is brilliant.

Michelle Butler  1:02:17 

I know, right? I’m so excited.

Anne Brannen  1:02:20 

Never heard of this. You were able to surprise me completely. I’ve never heard of this, and I don’t know why.

Michelle Butler  1:02:25 

This is Juliet Barker. I’m amazed I was able to finish the book after this. I’m like, oh my god, I gotta go find out about this.

Anne Brannen  1:02:34 

Yeah, yeah, yeah, because it’s obviously a clarion call to a rabbit hole.

Michelle Butler  1:02:38 

Oh my god, yes. Okay. “Any intruders who stumbled upon the entrances found themselves lost in a maze of narrow, winding corridors, or ambushed when bending double below doorways deliberately set too low. So well hidden and secure was this underground city that it was in constant use from Roman times until the end of the 17th century. Rediscovered in 1887 after a lapse of almost 200 years, it found a new lease of life in the bloodbath of the 20th century–“

Anne Brannen  1:03:14 

No!

Michelle Butler  1:03:15 

Here we go! –“serving as the headquarters of English, Canadian and Australian troops in the First World War and of Rommel in the second. Nevertheless, early 15th century graffiti and coins dating from the reign of Charles the sixth which were discovered in the lowest level chambers and galleries indicate that The people of the Noir region fled there in response to Henry the Fifth’s invasions of Normandy.

Michelle Butler  1:03:46 

Wow. Thank you.

Michelle Butler  1:03:50 

Even though it’s Juliet Barker, who I fan girl over tremendously, I had to go check and make sure this was real, because it sounds utterly made up. But it is real. It is open for tours. It’s no longer–I mean, I guess if somebody were to invade Normandy now, you could still head on down there, but now it is open for tours. And this part blew my mind even more, there’s a video from the official tourism site on YouTube that gives you about a five minute ‘this is so awesome, come and see this’ video that includes an interview with one of the last inhabitants of Noirs to shelter in the cave during the Second World War. She was a child.

Anne Brannen  1:04:35 

Oh, my God, I had no idea. And I’m so glad to know that it existed and that intelligent people thought it up, and that it was a place where people could be safe from war, like for centuries. And so all the generals who are having war above them don’t know it’s there, huh?

Michelle Butler  1:04:53 

They don’t know what’s there. And they keep their mouth shut.

Anne Brannen  1:04:57 

Oh my goodness.

Michelle Butler  1:04:58 

They just disappear and go down. And they can bring their animals.

Anne Brannen  1:05:02 

So they didn’t have to leave the dogs and kitties behind, yeah.

Michelle Butler  1:05:05 

And they brought down as many sheep, cattle, horses and mules as they could sneak in there.

Anne Brannen  1:05:11 

That is amazing.

Michelle Butler  1:05:13 

People don’t live down there all the time, obviously.

Anne Brannen  1:05:16 

Right, but you need to sometimes.

Michelle Butler  1:05:17 

It’s a refuge to go to when Normandy is being invaded yet again.

Anne Brannen  1:05:22 

And sometimes, you know, sometimes wars last for a long, long time. I mean, Normandy. Normandy got invaded, and had been invaded for quite some time during World War Two.

Michelle Butler  1:05:31 

This was there when the Vikings were invading. When they took over Normandy, this was already there, because this was built in Roman times.

Anne Brannen  1:05:39 

Oh, my God.

Michelle Butler  1:05:40 

The Gauls built this. I mean, obviously it was expanded over the course of years, but it was there. That blew my mind. It was there. The Vikings probably never found it. Because why would anybody tell them?

Anne Brannen  1:05:54 

No, you wouldn’t, would you? No, the Vikings never found it. Oh, my God. So you can go. So this is part of our interesting tourism of medieval crime. Oh, good, because we got to do one of those interactive maps where you can click on places and see places to go. The tourism.

Michelle Butler  1:06:12 

I quite desperately want to go see this.

Anne Brannen  1:06:15 

I do too. I do too. I want to go see it. Thank you. That’s wonderful. These things I did not know.

Michelle Butler  1:06:25 

I’m so glad you hadn’t heard of it. I was so excited to share that with you. So that’s what the local inhabitants were doing while Henry was marching overhead trying to find a way across the river.

Anne Brannen  1:06:38 

Well, I’m glad to know that a bunch of them had a safe place to go. This is very good and to get their sheep and cattle out of the way so that they didn’t get eaten.

Michelle Butler  1:06:47 

I really don’t have anything else. That was my big finish. Ta-da.

Anne Brannen  1:06:49 

Ending with the wonderful chalk caves of Normandy. That’s our discussion of Agincourt. Was it a war crime? How do you define war crime? Our discussion of Agincourt and the killing of the prisoners, and the next time that you hear from us–we’ve had two timely podcasts in a row, Columbus and Agincourt– and we’re going to have another one for Halloween, because we’re going to discuss the werewolf scare of–when is it, Michelle?

Michelle Butler  1:07:19 

It’s late medieval, early modern, so it’s like 16th century. All of a sudden, there’s all of these things where people are getting arrested, like, ‘Oh, you’re clearly a werewolf.’ Where did this come from?

Anne Brannen  1:07:34 

Oh, that sounds good. I like it. And where is this?

Michelle Butler  1:07:38 

A lot of it’s in Germany, but it’s actually kind of all over.

Anne Brannen  1:07:41 

Well, okay, all right. So the next time you hear from us, we’re going to discuss werewolves for Halloween. So this has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. We can be found on Spotify and Apple and all the places where the podcasts are hanging out. We ourselves are at Truecrimemedieval.com, Truecrimemedieval is all one word. There you can find links to the podcast, links to the show notes, links to the transcriptions and a three piece index, so that you can find things by what their main characters were, or where they were, or you know what horrible thing was going on. Yes, and you can leave comments. We like comments. You can tell us about any medieval crimes you know of that we haven’t talked about yet, that you think we should talk about. And we often do them, actually. I think almost always, if somebody tells us about a crime, that ends up on our list? So we’ll talk about werewolves next. Bye. Transcri

117. Columbus Captures Arawaks and Demands They Tell Him Where the Gold Is, Guanahani (in the Bahamas) October 12, 1492

Anne Brannen  0:24 

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen. I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:33 

And I’m Michelle Butler, in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:36 

We are going to talk about Christopher Columbus today, who committed some crimes, because we’ve been meaning to talk about him for some time, and so now we have it. He’s at least guilty of disobeying his monarchs in one of the voyages, and clearly opening the door to genocide in the New World and various other sorts of things. So here’s the story. As usual, I’m going to do the history and the context. Columbus was born in 1451, in probably Genoa. He was the son of a cheese seller, and he started sailing young. He says that he started at 14, and he became a trader. He went to Greece, he went to Portugal, a bunch of other places, including maybe Iceland, maybe not. He settled in Castile, where in 1485 he met his second wife in Cordova. And he read a lot. He read astronomy and history and geography and travel narratives, and apparently he made little notes in the margins too. As a trader, he was interested in the European problem of how to get most easily to India and China after Constantinople had fallen to the Ottoman Empire. That was 1453, and we actually mentioned that in our discussion of the Latin massacre in Constantinople. Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans in 1453, and at that point, the Silk Road was closed to the Europeans, and that was the land route to the east. Although it was possible to go a northern route through the Balkans, it was problematic and not as useful. You come on through the north there. The Europeans needed a sea route so that they could get the things that they wanted to spend money on–and they could do all their trading–that was spices and silks, basically. For trade purposes necessary to find a sea route. So people had been working on this. In 1497 Vasco da Gama, who was a Portuguese explorer, would reach India by sailing down the African west coast and around the Cape of Good Hope and then northeast on up to the bottom tip of India. Other Portuguese expeditions had been sailing down the African West Coast for about 100 years before that, and it was Bartolomeo Diaz who sailed around the Cape and some way up the eastern African coast. He got back in 1488. After that, Columbus made his first voyage. Okay. So there already was a way to get through, but it was very dangerous, because Cape Hope is really, really windy with giant waves, so that was not great. The whole point was, can we get to the east by going west? Totally makes sense. The Portuguese had considered the possibility of sailing west rather than going south, and by 1474 they had been thinking about that, though the king rejected that idea. Columbus connected with the Italian astronomer who had suggested the western route as a possibility, and Columbus sent that possibility to the Portuguese king. The astronomer was Paolo Toscarelli, and Columbus had a map from Toscarelli that showed the possible western route. It just sort of kind of ignores what will become like, you know, North and South America. But to get to the east by going that way, you could get there. While this was all going on, Bartolomeo Diaz sailed around the Cape so it looked like the southern route would open up, and which it did, though later. Columbus needed money for this whole expedition, and he had trouble finding it because it was going to involve sailing off across very deep ocean for a long way, and the Portuguese explorations around the African coast had been closer to shore. They’re not following the shore exactly, but they’re not sailing off across the deep ocean. It was, at the time, highly dangerous to do that, not just to get to the land mass to the west, because there was going to be a land mass to the west, just not what they thought, but to get back that involves two different trade winds. It’s problematic, and they don’t always work. The knowledge of the trade winds at the time wasn’t comprehensive. So he went to the Portuguese and the Portuguese experts calculated that Columbus’s estimate of the mileage to the western land mass was too low, which indeed it was. So he then went to Spain, and their experts also thought that the mileage estimation was too low, so he went back to Portugal, but Bartolomeo Diaz at that point rounded Cape Hope, so why bother with the western route? The Portuguese were happy with what they had. Then in 1492 after Spain reconquered Granada from the Moors, Columbus was called back because at that point, Spain had money that could spend, which it had not been able to spend while it was at war. So it had some money. The experts still thought that the expedition would not work, but it was clear to Isabella that somebody was going to be taking him up on this, if not Portugal and Spain, it was going to be France. So because they had the extra money, and because this looked like something that was a risk good to take so that somebody else didn’t get in on it, Spain agreed to finance the expedition and Columbus was given the title Admiral of the Open Seas, and he was given the status of Viceroy and governor of any lands he colonized, and 10% of the revenue from whatever places he colonized as long as he was alive. The ships weren’t large ones. I’ve seen them called medium sized. I’ve also seen them called small. They were about as big as tennis courts, which seems to me a pretty small ship to be sending across the open seas. So one of the reasons that the expedition was probably going to fail was that there wasn’t enough room to put all the supplies in that they were going to need, according to the experts who thought that Columbus was going to need more than he thought. The length of the trip was going to be too long for the supplies that they could put on the ships, which were too small, so they were probably not getting over to the western land mass. This is why Columbus got such good terms, because Isabella didn’t think he was going to be able to get back. So why not tell him he could be all these things. I mean, if he did get back, great, you know, they’d have some money, he could have 10% of it, have some titles, but he probably wouldn’t. So whatever. Did you know that, Michelle? Because I hadn’t known that they really didn’t think he was going to be getting back.

Michelle Butler  7:21 

I knew that the ships they gave him were not exactly state of the art. That they were like, Yeah, we got these guys over here that are basically on their way out, and they had to actually wait for the Nina to be repaired. Basically, they were like, sure, go ahead. You can have this 1965 Volkswagen Bug. Have at it.

Anne Brannen  7:45 

Good luck. Haha, France. Haha. Any rate, it wasn’t costing them an extravagant amount of money. And they had some money to spare, since they weren’t trying to fight the Moors anymore. So the expedition– this is the one that’s all famous, and if you were a child of my era, you learned the ‘In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue,’ blah blah, blah. They set off in August of 1492 and the rudder on the Pinta broke almost immediately. The sailors kind of had to tie it up with rope. Then everybody had to get to the Canary Islands. They fixed the rudder, and they changed the sails on the Nina, and they got some new provisions. So then they went off. It took 29 days before they even saw flocks of birds. And they changed course to follow the birds. These are the sea birds. There was a mutiny three days later because they’d been following the birds, but they still had not gotten to any place that had like, you know, land you could step on. But Columbus was able to stop that, which he did by swearing up and down that if they didn’t see actual land within three days, they would all go back to Spain. You know, as opposed to the birds–like real land. So they kept going. In two days, lucky for Columbus, they saw land. That was October 12, in the early morning, and Rodrigo de Triana, one of the sailors saw land, though Columbus said he saw it first, so he could get the reward for the first sighting. That was an annual sum until you died. So Columbus got that. I don’t know if that’s a big crime so much as just being an annoying bastard. The island that they landed on a few hours later, after they saw land, was called by the people that lived there, Guanahani. Columbus called it San Salvador. The island in the Bahamas which is still called San Salvador is probably the one he landed on, although we are not certain. He did believe that he had reached the East Indies, which is why he called the inhabitants Indios, and he captured some of the inhabitants and demanded that they show him where the gold came from that they had been able to make into the ornaments that they were wearing. He noted that the inhabitants would be easy to conquer because of their weaponry, which wasn’t as good as European weaponry. He left some of his men behind on Hispaniola, which is now in the Dominican Republic, where he had to abandon the Santa Maria because it ran aground. So they established a Spanish settlement there. It was called La Navidad, which is gone now because it got burnt down the next year by the native inhabitants–more on that later–and they started home in January of 1493. They did eventually make it back, though there was a very bad storm, and they got waylaid by the governor of an island in the Azores that they had landed on, who wanted to capture Columbus but didn’t manage to, even though he brought armed men to the ship. They got out of that dilemma and made it to Lisbon, where the Portuguese king told Columbus that he had violated a treaty, and they finally got back to Spain in March. He had brought stuff, of course, but nothing that Spain wanted. He did not bring any cloves and ginger and pepper, whatnot. He brought gold, jewelry, some pearls, some kidnapped humans, tobacco, pineapple, and turkeys. He said that he had reached an island off the coast of China. He exaggerated the riches. There was lots of gold, there was mines, there was lots of gold. It was beautiful and very fertile, and there was lots of gold. He said all those things, and it seemed plausible to most people, so the pope helped to divide the new places up between Spain and Portugal. Okay, that was some kind of thing. I don’t think that really meant anything much. But Columbus went back in his second voyage, September of 1493, and this voyage was specifically to Christianize the inhabitants of the new place, or the newly found place, of course, since it was an old place to people who had already been there. Lots of ships, bigger ships, and the second expedition reached the Caribbeans. In November of 1493, they came across Caribs. This is why it’s called the Caribbeans, because the Caribs were living there. They came across Caribs in there. They were in a canoe. They had a couple of mutilated captives, and so they attacked. They killed and beheaded everybody, except for a woman that Columbus “gave”–this is in quotation marks–to his friend Michel de Cuneo, who beat her into submission. He calls this quote, “reaching an agreement,” which is why, apparently, some scholars believe that the sex that followed wasn’t rape. In Guadalupe, they rescued women being kept as sex slaves by the Caribs, along with some boys who had been castrated and were being kept alive until it was time to eat them. So they fought and enslaved the Caribs quite often. Then they went to what is now called Puerto Rico, which Columbus named San Juan Bautista, after St John the Baptist. The rescued people at that point went home, because that’s where they were from. The cannibalism may well have been exaggerated. Cannibalism that the Caribs were practicing may well have been exaggerated, but when the Caribs conquered, they killed the men, that’s clear, and the women were enslaved, that’s also clear. The cannibalism, there is some discussion about. There’s some disagreement. Columbus then discovered that the settlement that he had made the year before, La Navidad, had been burned to the ground and the Europeans wiped out because the native people had attacked them after the Europeans had been murdering, stealing, and raping. Okay. By 1494 two thirds of the Spanish who had settled on Hispaniola were dead from disease and famine. Columbus, meanwhile, was punishing natives suspected of theft by beheading them and/or cutting their ears off, and one of his officers was ordered to convert the natives to Christianity. Oh, right, yeah, that’s the point of this whole expedition–they forgot about that part–which he did by raping and enslaving them. When this was going on, Columbus punished the European perpetrators because apparently Columbus thought that converting people should not be done by raping and enslaving them. Okay. There was a tribute system that was then being instituted, and this involved the natives having to pay a tribute. When they paid the tribute, they were given a little token that they were supposed to keep with them, like wear around their neck, to show that they had paid, and if they were found without the token, they were punished. But there wasn’t enough gold on the island for the people to make the tribute. So there were suicides. There were apparently suicides in the thousands. The token system had to get stopped because the people could not pay the tokens, and so killing them just really was not working. So 1495. Columbus cut the hands off of native people who weren’t doing whatever the hell he had ordered them to do, and they left in March of 1496 and managed to get back to Spain in June. Okay. There was a third voyage. And this one wasn’t to make everybody Christian. You can see how well that was going earlier. This was to find the continent on account of, obviously, they had only run into the islands. So they wanted to find the continent of China or India, whichever one they were going to get to. That expedition left in May of 1498, after some difficulties. They got stuck in the doldrums. There were some wandering around in islands. They got to the Orinoco River, the mouth of the Orinoco River, which they recognized as being on land mass. So Columbus thought it was Asia, and he took the province for Spain, what’s now northern Venezuela. That’s what he took, and he sailed further along the coast. But he was not well. He was beginning to get very ill. So they went back to Hispaniola, where he found the Spanish settlers really pissed off at the lack of riches which were there–hence the not being a tribute anymore–which they’d been told were there. Gold, gold. It was everywhere, the gold, much like the later conquistadores were going to find in New Mexico. Gold, gold, gold. It was all over. Apparently Taos Pueblo had been slathered in gold. I guess it was all gone by the time the conquistadores got there. And so it was in Hispaniola long before then. The settlers and sailors took Columbus to court for mismanagement, and so he hangs some of the sailors because there was a mutiny. He wasn’t Christianizing the natives in Hispaniola like he was supposed to. This is where he is not obeying the monarchs, because if he did, he couldn’t enslave them, which was much more profitable, although he was enslaving war captives, which was supposedly okay, so he enslaved them in the name of the Holy Trinity. I hope you’re impressed, Michelle.

Michelle Butler  16:48 

Well, that makes it all better then.

Anne Brannen  16:50 

I’m sure the Holy Trinity, all three of them, they were so excited. In 1500, Columbus was arrested and sent back to Spain in chains for mismanagement. He was going to get released later, though no longer being governor of the colony. In that inquiry, Francisco de Bobadilla, from one of the military orders–that was Calatrava Military Order–became governor of the new territory and confiscated Columbus’s papers and his possessions. He auctioned off his possessions, apparently, according to Columbus’s son, Ferdinand, and he took testimony. He got a bunch of testimony from what Columbus’s son calls biased persons, and this testimony is very controversial. Okay, so like 23 witnesses testified that Columbus had enslaved natives rather than baptized them, that he had Spaniards whipped for trading gold without approval, that he had a woman whipped while naked, that he had a woman’s tongue cut out on account of insulting him, that he had the throat of a Spaniard cut because he was supposedly homosexual, that he hung Spaniards for stealing bread, that he had had the hand cut off of a cabin boy for catching fish, that he had had people whipped sometimes to death, that he had noses and ears cut off, that he wouldn’t allow people to have food even though there was enough, and the Crown stripped Columbus of his governorship. The court clearly judged that the mismanagement was true, but the arguments about Columbus’s nature and character and actions are vastly divisive. Howard Zinn, in ‘A People’s History of the United States,’ is the one who asserted first that the positive view of Columbus–I believe Michelle is going to talk to you about this–should be overturned because of Columbus’s brutal treatment of the native people. We have the court case and the writings from contemporaries that back that up, but there has been pushback. There’s a Dominican missionary, who knew Columbus and who was against exploitation of the native people, said that Columbus was sweet and benign. Also, Columbus did not intend to commit genocide, and didn’t actually do it himself. Also, he took slaves when they were prisoners of war or being cannibals, so at the time, that was okay. Also, he really was religious. No kidding. In later life, he dressed like a Franciscan, although I believe Michelle is going to have some stuff to say about that also. And also in his writings, he does describe the sex trafficking of young girls and condemns it. He did indeed kill and enslave members of the Taino people who very soon were completely eradicated. We call this genocide, but that it was after they burned his settlement down, and also other people committed atrocities later and so really, it wasn’t entirely his fault. Also, Bobadilla’s report is not objective history, because he was deeply anti-Columbus and wanted to be governor. This one actually sounds pretty good to me. Also, his desire for gold was so that he could fund a new crusade to retake Jerusalem. I believe this is something he said, and also on the first encounter, he admired the natives for their intelligence and generosity and ordered his men not to harm them. This is all over the place, is what this is. Fourth voyage. There was another voyage. Spain funded another expedition on which Columbus wanted to sail around the world. Because, okay, he had found the actual continent of what was supposedly India, or he had found Asia. So he wanted to sail around the world in the same way that the Portuguese had been able to sail around Africa and get to India and China. He wanted to figure out how to sail around the world and get around the continent and get from China to India, apparently. Anyway, so fourth voyage. He left in March of 1502, and he got to Martinique in June. He wasn’t supposed to land at Hispanola, of which he was no longer the governor, but he did try to land in Hispaniola because there was a hurricane coming. But Bobadilla, as you remember, he’s now the governor of Hispaniola, got caught in that hurricane because he did not believe Christopher Columbus that there was a hurricane coming, and Bobadilla died. So he’s dead. There’s going to be a new governor later, who also hates Columbus. But okay, so Columbus got to Panama–as we know now, that is the shortest land route across Central America. Actually, pretty soon, some other guy is going to find this out, but I’ll tell you later. In late 1502, Columbus got to Panama, but things did not go well on account of storms and attacks and the fact that the Panama Canal had not been built yet. So he did not get across the continent. He got back to Jamaica and had to canoe to Hispaniola, because he needed to get rescued. But the new governor would not rescue anybody because he hated Columbus also, even though he wasn’t Bobadilla. But Columbus got the goodwill of the natives by predicting a lunar eclipse, just like in many later movies. But then there was a mutiny. Why not? Finally, in 1504, an extremely reduced crew got back to Spain. So there you are, the four voyages of Christopher Columbus and the various generosities and misdeeds of Christopher Columbus. What happened next? In 1513, Vasco Nunez de Balboa of Spain was the first European to get to the Pacific from the new lands, which he did after founding a European settlement in Panama and hearing that there was “another sea,” traveled across the isthmus and got to the Pacific Ocean. So that’s the first time that the Europeans saw the Pacific Ocean from its eastern shore. In October of 1520, another Spaniard, Magellan, found the western sea route to the east, reaching the Pacific by going through what’s now called the Strait of Magellan. It’s not at the very tip of Chile. It’s at the southern tip of Chile, but not all the way down. Reaching eventually, after an extremely long and dramatic expedition–so dramatic that Magellan didn’t survive it, being killed at the Battle of Mactan against the natives of Mactan Island in what’s now the Philippines. They got to Indonesia in November of 1521, so that’s the first time that the Europeans had gotten from Europe by sea all the way going west to Asia. In that expedition, by the way, 277 men had sailed from Spain, and–Magellan didn’t get back, he’s dead–18 got back in 1522. Five got back by 1526. And five more got to Indonesia, but were buried at sea on the way. The passage through Cape Horn, which is down at the very tip of Chile, that got discovered by the Dutch later. The search for a sea route to the eastern spices and silks led to more and more and more European voyages of discovery–colonization. This is beginning of what’s called, “The Age of Discovery,” which is, as of course we all know, it’s not really the age of discovery. It’s the “Age of getting some places you haven’t seen before.” That’s what that is. So if you’re still like me, wondering about the Silk Road, what about the Silk Road? What about the damn Silk Road? Okay, there was, for a while, after the loss of the Silk Road, a northern land route, as I mentioned, through the Baltics, but by the 18th century, that was also lost, as national boundaries shifted and also it was more difficult. I’m sure you’ve heard of snow. There was a New Silk Road because the Eurasian land bridge. The transcontinental railway was finished in 1916 and that was the primary land route in between Asia and Europe from the 1960s to the 1990s, but Russia used a different rail system, so you couldn’t really use that, could you? Thank you, Russia. So China added a link between its rail system and the Transsiberian rail through Kazakhstan in 1990–ya hey China–and in 2015 that rail was made to connect Europe through Central and South Asia. And they’re planning on expanding. As long as various places aren’t being bombed, it’s going to be really, really useful, but, you know, mostly it’s the water route. The land route still problematic. Michelle, your turn.

Michelle Butler  25:51 

I was really fascinated by–I don’t know if you would call it a book, but a collection. It’s almost like a commonplace book. I don’t know that he was intending to publish it, but he’s definitely making an argument. I don’t want to imply that it’s like a stream of consciousness journal or something. It’s possible that he had an audience in mind. He just didn’t get it to the point where he was wanting to send it to them. It’s possible he actually meant to send this to the monarchs, but it is The Book of Prophecies. We now know this as The Book of Prophecies. So after being hauled back in chains to have the trial for the mismanagement of Hispaniola, and by the way, what a freaking drama queen. Once they’re on board, the captain of the ship’s like, hey, we could take those manacles off, and he’s like, No, I want the monarchs to see me in my–

Anne Brannen  26:38 

I have been badly done by. I want the visuals.

Michelle Butler  26:42 

He leaves them on until he gets in front of the monarchs.

Anne Brannen  26:46 

That is definitely being a drama queen. You know, he could have just had the Captain put them on when they got to harbor, I would think. 

Michelle Butler  26:52 

Freaking drama queen. So after this, he sinks into grievance thinking, and from there into the comforts of religion, I mean, but the drama queenness just continues. He sees himself as Job, beset on all sides and long suffering. From there, he returns to an idea he had been tinkering with during the second and third voyages, that he was sent by God. He starts to think of himself as like John the Baptist.

Anne Brannen  27:29 

Oh just like.

Michelle Butler  27:30 

Just like, yeah. Jeffrey Simcox and Blair Sullivan, in a book called Christopher Columbus and the Enterprise of the Indies: A Brief History with Documents describes this. This is a direct quote. “He sought to demonstrate that divine providence had directed his voyages.” And he starts work on the book that we now call the Book of Prophecies. And what this is…I mean, first of all, it is breathtaking in its arrogance. This is up there with Thomas Jefferson rewriting the New Testament to take out all the stuff that is clearly superstition. We are in the same ballpark. This is a collection of the passages in the Bible that Columbus thinks foretells him and his discoveries.

Anne Brannen  28:22 

Oh. New or the Old Testament?, by the way.

Michelle Butler  28:26 

Mostly the Old Testament. Mostly Isaiah.

Anne Brannen  28:30 

Yeah, okay, that sounds right. Mostly, I would think that Jesus really doesn’t have a lot to say about this.

Michelle Butler  28:34 

It is pretty well a collection of all of the references to islands in the Old Testament. The magnificent biography that I read just called Columbus by Felipe Fernandez Armesto, this is how he describes it: “The habit of ferrying for scriptural prophecies of his own work first became a habit, and then later, after Columbus’s third voyage, an obsession which fed the providential and messianic delusions that would come to grip him in later life.” He doesn’t cope well when things don’t work out the way he is hoping that they will. He dreams real big. You have to be somebody who believes your own story. You have to be somebody who believes your own bullshit in order to do what he did.

Anne Brannen  29:24 

I have a question. So clearly, from the story that I have told, clearly, things did not always go well, and many people thought badly of him. Since the Holy Spirit had created these journeys, does he think that this is proof of the journeys being holy in the same way that Marjorie Kemp thinks that the fact that everybody wants her to shut up is proof that she really is, you know, talking to God?

Michelle Butler  29:48 

Yes, actually. Tt’s really fascinating you mentioned Margery Kemp, because I made a list of three medieval people he reminds me of.

Anne Brannen  29:55 

One is Margery

Michelle Butler  29:56 

One is Margery Kemp,

Anne Brannen  29:59 

I’m so sorry to hear that.

Michelle Butler  30:03 

Not only does he become convinced that he was sent by God to find the West Indies–and also he waffles back and forth about whether he made it to India or whether he’s discovered a new continent, depending on which argument is better in the moment. At the beginning, he was absolutely convinced he was in the West Indies. Then he becomes, well, you know, actually, maybe not. Maybe there’s a new continent, maybe that is more impressive. Then by the time he’s coming back into the Book of Prophecies and creating this self hagiography. He’s trying to write his own legend. He’s returned back to, ‘No, I made it to the West Indies. That was my plan, and I did it.’

Anne Brannen  30:56 

‘And damn it, just because they don’t have any ginger is not my fault.’

Michelle Butler  31:01 

So he becomes convinced that not only was he sent as a prophet to find these places, he becomes convinced that his discoveries are part of the foretold events leading up to the end of the world, which is the Messianic part that Fernando Armesto is talking about. I told you, before we turned on the recording, that I wrote, ‘Oh, lordy’ in the margin of this book more than any other scholarly book I have ever read. It’s like half a dozen times. This is an amazingly written biography, though. If indeed English is Felipe–I mean, I’m guessing, but I don’t know for sure–but if English is Felipe Fernandez Armesto’s second language, he’s brilliant. And if it’s his first language, still brilliant. This is the most beautifully written, with gentle snark, biography a person could ask for.

Anne Brannen  32:01 

You know, I don’t really want to read a lot about Christopher Columbus anymore, but I may have to read this just because it sounds so good.

Michelle Butler  32:09 

Oh, it’s a beautifully, beautifully written book. I should have pulled out some of the places where I loved it, just for his prose. I have a couple of quotes that I’m going to share with you in a little bit that are important for his description of Columbus, but there are other places where I just stopped and went, what a nice sentence. So he thinks that we’re 155 years from the end of the world, and he gets there because he’s dating from–so it’s Bible math, right? He thinks that the world is this amount of years from creation old. And he does some calculations based on Revelation, that it’s going to end at this amount of age, and he comes up with, ‘holy crap, we have 155 years left. Shit’s got to start happening. And wouldn’t you know it, I’m a part of that.’

Anne Brannen  33:03 

Thank God, because clearly he saved us from the end of the world.

Michelle Butler  33:08 

So he returns to his obsession with a new crusade. This was one of the reasons I wanted to put him on our list, because Columbus gets talked about so much as the beginning of a new era, and I was fascinated at the ways in which he is medieval in his core. He was born in 1450. He is still a medieval person.

Anne Brannen  33:37 

I’m not thinking of this as a special episode. It’s medieval.

Michelle Butler  33:41 

He is utterly obsessed with a new crusade and retaking Jerusalem. He is urging–so this is one of the things that’s happening in the Book of Prophecies. He is urging the Spanish monarchs, ‘Okay, it’s time launch that crusade, because it is absolutely gonna work his time. I’m totally know it’s true.’ He cites a sketchy prophecy that the liberator of Jerusalem will come from Spain. But that one’s not from the Bible. It’s from somebody else. This is where we go into Margery Kemp land. He thinks that God talks to him. He thinks that there is a mystical voice that is the voice of God that talks to him. So I’m gonna go over to–this is a long quote from the biography, but I think it’s worth sharing with you–he had a big old giant quote from Columbus’s journal where he is talking about…so, for example: “I heard a voice in pious accents saying, O foolish man and slow to serve your God, the God of all. What more did he accomplish for Moses or for his servant, David, from the hour of your birth, he has always had a special care of you. And when he saw that you were of an age that it pleased him, he made your name resound in all the Earth. The Indies that are so rich a portion of the world he gave you for your own.”

Anne Brannen  35:05 

It’s just like Margery Kemp, and Jesus tells her that she’s even bigger than Bridget of Sweden. It’s just like that.

Michelle Butler  35:13 

It is just like Margery Kemp, I’m so glad that that occurred to you, too.

Anne Brannen  35:17 

Oh yeah.

Michelle Butler  35:20 

That was a quote from Columbus’s journals. And then here is what the biographer has to say about that…There’s lots more of it, but it’s all in the same vein, so I’m gonna not quote you more of the celestial voice patting Columbus on the back and saying, You are my dude man. You are my dude.

Anne Brannen  35:39 

You are awesome.

Michelle Butler  35:41 

You are my guy. I have your back.

Anne Brannen  35:44 

You’re like Saint John the Baptist.

Michelle Butler  35:48 

Okay, so this is what the biographer has to say about him. “This was Columbus’s longest and most detailed account of his experiences of his celestial voice, either because on this occasion, the voice had the most to say” — see what I mean about the snark– “or because on this occasion, the circumstances were most traumatic and the voice most therapeutic. The nature of the voice here took on a new characteristic, as an ally in Columbus’s self projection and a mouthpiece of some of his bitterest complaints against Ferdinand and Isabella.” And this is the part that stopped me in my tracks. “The Indies and the ocean, for instance, were depicted as bestowed by God directly on Columbus, in person, as a domain which Columbus, by divinely delegated authority, passed on to the monarchs. Not only was this a distortion of the facts, since it was by grant of the monarchs that Columbus derived his authority and not the other way around, it was an extremely subversive doctrine. The legitimacy of medieval government depended on the assumptions that the powers that be are ordained by God, and that divine election elevated monarchs above their subjects. For anyone but a king to claim his honor directly from God was, by Columbus’s time, although, there were earlier instances of this, an unimaginable challenge to royal authority.” That stopped me, to really stop and think about it, because he is, in that passage, at least to himself, arguing that he is just as empowered as the monarchs by God.

Anne Brannen  37:33 

Oh, lordy.

Michelle Butler  37:34 

If the monarchs had seen that, that would have been treason. He’s probably writing this for himself, so it’s just ill advised, but that would have got him in some trouble.

Anne Brannen  37:46 

Yeah, and it’s not like your papers don’t ever get confiscated. I mean, they’ve been confiscated before in Hispaniola.

Michelle Butler  37:55 

The biographer’s assessment of Columbus is that he is a man of paradoxes.

Anne Brannen  38:01 

Yes. Absolutely. That’s what I was–I was like, my god, this is all over the place.

Michelle Butler  38:08 

If you will indulge another long quote–you could always shorten it for the recording if you want, but I think you will want to hear this. “Columbus was a self avowed ignoramus who challenged the received wisdom of his day. His servility before old texts combined with his paradoxical delight whenever he was able to correct them from experience, mark him at once as one of the last torch bearers of medieval cosmography, who carried their lights on the shoulders of their predecessors and one of the first beacons of the scientific revolution, whose glow was kindled from within by their preference for experiment over authority.” Sidebar, that’s a really interesting piece of the Book of Prophecies, because it says it is citing auctoritas. It uses that medieval way of arguing, and the book starts with laying out those four levels of how to understand scripture, which is also deeply, deeply medieval. Back to the quotation–because I forgot to mention about the auctoritas and I thought it was important–“this same sort of paradox enlivened every aspect of his character. His attraction towards fantasy and wishful thinking was ill accommodated in that hard head, half full already with a sense of trade and profit. In his dealings with the crown and his concern for his posterity, his mysticism was tempered by a materialism only less slightly intense, like the rich gurus who are equally familiar nowadays in spiritual retreats and business circles. Though religion was a powerful influence in his life, its effects were strangely limited. His devotional bequests were few. His charity began and almost ended at home. The Indians, he discovered, he contemplated with evangelical zeal and treated with callous disregard. He was an inveterate practitioner of deception, a perennial victim of self delusion, but he was rarely consciously mendacious in dealing with subordinates. He was calculating and ingenuous by turns. He craved admirers, but could not keep friends.” God, I love that description, because it is bang on.

Anne Brannen  40:22 

Yeah. It’s really specific, really clear. This all makes sense to me from what I’ve been reading. So much better said than I could have done.

Michelle Butler  40:30 

“His anxiety for ennoblement, his self confessed ambition for status and wealth, did not prevent him from taking a certain pride in his modest origins and comparing the weaver Admiral with the shepherd king.”  Side bar again, just in case comparing yourself to John the Baptist wasn’t good enough, now he’s moving on to comparing himself to Christ.

Anne Brannen  40:51 

Yeah, the shepherd King is Jesus.

Michelle Butler  40:53 

“He loved adventure, but could not bear adversity.” That was another line that stopped me, because it’s perfect. “He loved adventure, but could not bear adversity. Most paradoxically of all, beyond the islands and mainlands of the ocean, Columbus explored involuntarily the march lands between genius and insanity. Times of stress unhinged and sometimes perhaps actually deranged him. In his last such sickness, he obsessively disregarded his own most luminous ideas and never recovered them.” I know it’s an enormous quote to read, but it’s such a great synopsis of him, of the paradoxes of him. I really struggled with him, because he first reminded me of the Pastons, these people who claw their way up from peasantry basically to become lords. Then he reminded me of Margery Kemp with the ‘God’s got my back’ and the crazy–I mean, they’re totally delusional visions that he’s having. And then he reminded me of Thomas Malory, who he is a contemporary of, with a foot in the Middle Ages and a foot in what’s coming next, and able to understand both. Malory’s a little bit older, because Mallory dies in 1471 so Malory feels more medieval, until you poke at him and realize, when we talked about this, when we did our episode of Malory, the massive work he is doing to the inherited stories which make it then comprehensible. Even now, we could go and read it in a way that reading the Vulgate–reading the Vulgate is hard reading, reading Malory is not too bad.

Anne Brannen  42:39 

Yeah, you can make it fit together in your head or completely, if you know you’re T.H. White and doing The Once and Future King. It’s got some places that don’t really work, but not that many.

Michelle Butler  42:51 

It’s much closer to a modern novel than than the Vulgate. He’s doing enormous, enormous work rewriting that. But Columbus is exactly the same. He’s got a foot in both camps, he is standing in between the medieval and what’s coming next. I think it’s fascinating that popular conceptions of Malory call him medieval, and popular conceptions of Columbus call him Renaissance or early modern because the ways of talking about them and the stories we want to tell depend on those things they do.

Anne Brannen  43:25 

All of this argumentation about these two different poles–he’s a hero, he’s a villain–are naturally swinging back and forth when he’s such a contradictory person in and of himself, it totally makes sense, because you can make an argument for both.

Michelle Butler  43:38 

Yeah. I’m kind of done with the book of prophecies, which is an absolutely wild, wild, crazy little book to look at. It is totally and utterly odd that a book exists in which Columbus pulls together pieces of the Bible and says, see here–

Anne Brannen  43:58 

Here’s me, here’s the picture of me.

Michelle Butler  44:00 

That’s gonna be me. It’s bonkers.

Anne Brannen  44:04 

It’s bonkers. I did not know.

Michelle Butler  44:06 

The other thing I was interested in finding out is where on earth the story that Columbus proved in his voyage that the world is round came from because it is utterly, utterly false. It’s false from the jump. He never said that’s what he was doing. And the reason he never said that is that every educated person already knew the world was round. We talked about this a little bit earlier, that the argument he was having with the scholars in Portugal wasn’t about whether the world was flat or round. It was about, is it as big as you think it is? Well, our calculations say it’s bigger, and you can’t possibly carry enough stuff to go around it, you’re gonna die. And Columbus is like, ‘No, I did my own research. I think it’s smaller.’ Because he’s a believer in magical thinking.

Anne Brannen  44:55 

Yes, and he’s not as good at geometry as some of the other guys were.

Michelle Butler  45:01 

So I wanted to know where this came from. I found a book called Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians, by Jeffrey Burton Russell. It is quite a nice…actual research into where the hell this happened. Why on earth? He’s asking a couple of different questions, but the first one is, why in the hell does ‘everyone know’ that medieval people thought the world was flat.

Anne Brannen  45:28 

For the same reason that they know that they ate rotten food and covered it up with cinnamon. It got made up.

Michelle Butler  45:34 

It’s actually not a humongous book, but I’m gonna summarize it pretty quickly. It’s only about 100 pages long, but I’m not going to go into humongous, humongous detail. I will point people towards it. Go read this if you want to. Here’s the answers, the boiled down answers. On the side of fiction, this is Washington Irving’s fault.

Michelle Butler  45:55 

Oh ho ho.

Michelle Butler  46:00 

He wrote a, and I’m going to use quotes on this, because he wrote a “life” of Columbus in 1828, that he kind of sort of researched, but mostly just sort of took it and ran with it. It is sketchily informed historical fiction pretending to be nonfiction. He’s the one who invents this famous scene of Columbus standing before the assembled faculty at the University of Salamanca, arguing for the world being round.

Anne Brannen  46:38 

So that comes from historical fiction?

Michelle Butler  46:41 

No, it comes from what’s pretending to be nonfiction, but it’s really historical fiction. There’s a scholar, Samuel Elliot Morrison, writing in 1943, this is quoted in the book, and I want to read you the quote, because he is going at this…well, he calls this scene, “pure moonshine. Washington Irving, scenting his opportunity for a picturesque and moving scene, took a fictitious account of this non existent University Council published 130 years after the event” –i.e., the source he’s working with elaborated it–“and then let his imagination go completely. This has become one of the most popular Colombian myths, for we all love to hear of professors and experts being confounded by simple common sense. It is a distinctly American, part of the strand of antiintellectualism that has been part of America from the beginning. The whole story is misleading and mischievous nonsense. The sphericity of the globe was not in question. The issue was the width of the ocean and therein, the opposition was right.” It’s not just Irving, though. That’s the guy who popularizes this, but this isn’t actually a place where pop culture believes one thing, and all the scholars know it’s not correct. That’s not the case here. Irving is responsible for creating this in the popular side. And of course, we have to call out Bugs Bunny here. Do you remember the Bugs Bunny cartoon, “The Earth, she is a-round. The Earth, she is a-flat.”

Anne Brannen  48:15 

Yes, yes, I do.

Michelle Butler  48:16 

Which is where all of us, you know…I didn’t know that Washington Irving had written this so called biography. I did know about Bugs Bunny because it was now so deep, it’s now so deeply steeped into the culture, that it’s showing up. But on the other hand, all I knew about opera until like a year ago, was from Bugs Bunny, so not all bad.

Anne Brannen  48:39 

His version of Figaro is actually pretty good, I think.

Michelle Butler  48:45 

Then he talks about the scholars and why this is happening in a scholarly capacity. He’s actually a little bit harsher on those people, because he figures they really should know better.

Anne Brannen  48:55 

Yeah, you’d think that they would be looking for the sources, which, of course, will be non existent.

Michelle Butler  49:01 

Specifically the idea of–he calls this the flat error, but specifically the Flat Earth Myth–is a 19th century creation, but it is built on the earlier foundation of Renaissance, Enlightenment, and 18th century negative positioning of the Middle Ages.

Anne Brannen  49:21 

Oh. Because they were so stupid.

Michelle Butler  49:24 

Exactly so. You know, you have first creation of the Middle Ages, by the Renaissance, who want to emphasize their own brilliance by discrediting what came before.

Anne Brannen  49:35 

The Dark Ages, before we got all enlightened.

Michelle Butler  49:37 

I was sad to discover that it was Petrarch who created the phrase ‘the Dark Ages.’

Anne Brannen  49:44 

I am sad too.

Michelle Butler  49:45 

It was useful to create the idea of the benighted Middle Ages, the Dark Ages in order to say, but look at us, man, look at us. That was going on from the beginning. What comes into the mix in the 19th century is Darwinism, and now you got a split between science and religion in a way that wasn’t happening in the Renaissance, the Enlightenment. It’s a little bit in the 18th century. But with Darwinism, you have people in it actually coming from the scientific community first. It ends up being a mutual loathing, but it’s on the scientific side first, because they essentially are taking proactive steps. They think that they’re going to have all kinds of objections–which, they’re not wrong–to the idea of evolution, and they are arguing these things have nothing in common. You can’t have science that is based on religion and scholars who are trying to say, ‘but, but, but the scholastics, hello,’ can’t get a word in edgewise. They cannot remind anybody that the scholastics were the poster children for rational thinking, and that a great many of the things that become part of the scientific method were scholastic concepts. Another piece of this, I am sad to say, is anti Catholicism.

Anne Brannen  51:08 

Oh, I knew that part.

Michelle Butler  51:10 

The United States in particular was deeply anti Catholic.

Anne Brannen  51:15 

Oh, very.

Michelle Butler  51:18 

But that leads us to this gem, which I need on a t shirt. This is Henry St John Bolingbroke, who lived from 1678 to 1751.  Studying the Middle Ages is, “a ridiculous affectation in any man who means to be useful to the present age.”

Anne Brannen  51:41 

Well, that’s why they’re cutting all the grants.

Michelle Butler  51:46 

So, yeah, they have been shitting on medievalists since the 17th century.

Anne Brannen  51:50 

Because we’re useless.

Michelle Butler  51:52 

What the hell. All modern languages. That’s not important. How do you bait a medievalist? With stuff like this. You know this story, but the listeners probably don’t–the couple of times that my husband went to medieval conferences with me…after about the third one, he walked out and said, Would it be safe to say that the unspoken conclusion of all papers at medieval conferences is, ‘and thus I have proved again that medieval people weren’t stupid?’ Yes, that would be a fair thing. It is the unspoken–

Anne Brannen  52:21 

I repeat that a lot, actually.

Michelle Butler  52:23 

Thus we have proved again medieval people weren’t stupid.

Anne Brannen  52:29 

Sometimes badly behaved, we will say that.

Michelle Butler  52:31 

This creation of the idea that everybody thought the world was flat, and they don’t believe anything unless the church tells them it’s okay–it’s this, you know, benighted time, where if it’s not in the Bible, it can’t possibly be true–that dovetails really nicely with in the early 20th century, the creation of Columbus into a hero and actually a founding father. For real, for real. It’s being pushed partially because Italian Americans are tired of being treated badly, and they want to be accepted. They’re like, we got a seat at the table here. There’s lots of articles about that. Obviously, this totally over the top view of Columbus as a hero, the explorer, the person who persevered in the face of superstition and–

Anne Brannen  53:24 

Not having enough food–

Michelle Butler  53:26 

–all the forces pushing back against him and telling him he was a dolt. This obviously, has been tempered deservedly in recent years because of greater awareness of what happened to indigenous peoples in the Americas, and it remains a cultural flashpoint, Columbus Day versus indigenous Americans day. For some folks, trying to even be a little bit like, hey, maybe he wasn’t all that great, you know, maybe he didn’t commit the genocide, but, you know, bad stuff followed, and you can really get people riled up if you suggest that he was anything less than a god among men.

Anne Brannen  54:03 

To be fair, there are so many flashpoints right now, it is really hard to find something to talk about with people who aren’t of your entire, you know, world belief that doesn’t make them angry.

Michelle Butler  54:13 

Yeah, it’s the Emo Phillips skit. You know that Emo Phillips skit where they have this whole, you know, oh, are you a Reformed Baptist? Yes, I’m a Reformed Baptist. And then they go through the whole list, and then they get down to well, but it’s really minute, little difference. And the one says, No, I follow the other side. And he says, ‘heretic’ and pushes him off the cliff.

Anne Brannen  54:36 

Yeah, that’s pretty much what life is like in America right now.

Michelle Butler  54:39 

Oh my gosh, so much. It’s so tense and horrible. But I got the answer to where the Flat Earth Myth came from. And to no one’s surprise, it is the fault of the 19th century, because practically every misconception about the Middle Ages that is floating around, you can blame on the 19th century.

Anne Brannen  55:03 

Did we need the 19th century?  As medievalists, no, I think we could do without them.

Michelle Butler  55:11 

They do make teaching an interesting challenge, although I will say that towards the end of my teaching career, fewer students were coming in thinking that Vikings wore horns on their helmets. So the internet– don’t ever say the internet isn’t a force for good or can’t be a force for good, because the internet had taught them that Vikings did not actually have horns on their helmets. But the internet also still assures people that shame flutes were a thing. So.

Anne Brannen  55:38 

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Michelle Butler  55:40 

This was a much more complicated story than I thought it was going to be. My prep notes are titled– because I started this before I had done my research–the atrocities of Christopher Columbus. And I’ve got to change that, because that is not actually the case. The complexities of Christopher Columbus, perhaps.

Anne Brannen  55:59 

That is exactly what I found. I was surprised.

Michelle Butler  56:02 

So many people did, in fact, die.

Anne Brannen  56:04 

Well, yeah. So what I have learned is that he wasn’t as bad as I thought he was, but he’s not as good as a lot of people think he was, and he certainly wasn’t as good as he thought he was. So.

Michelle Butler  56:14 

Oh, my lord, and he goes way off into crazy land the last three or four years of his life. Yeah, we are well into Margery Kemp-land in those last three or four years.

Anne Brannen  56:28 

Poor bastard.

Michelle Butler  56:30 

He starts to create his own legend, and then he starts to believe his own press. It is kind of sad. The biography has a list of his actual accomplishments.

Anne Brannen  56:42 

Oh. The things that he really did do. Ooh,

Michelle Butler  56:46 

Would you like to know those?

Anne Brannen  56:48 

Yeah, why don’t we have that as our ending thing? What did he really do?

Michelle Butler  56:52 

“Despite nearly 500 years of assiduous detraction,” –because his last chapter, the biographer’s last chapter, is about how almost immediately, Columbus wasn’t even dead before people were like, he wasn’t really the discoverer. That’s how we ended up being called America, and not Columbia, because America Vespucci was going around, it wasn’t him, it was me.

Anne Brannen  57:10 

Well, he wasn’t the first person to sight the land. So, you know, there’s some fairness there, really.

Michelle Butler  57:18 

There’s some backlash. Because really, he did annoy a great many people.

Anne Brannen  57:22 

Yes. Much like Margery Kemp.

Michelle Butler  57:25 

All right. “Despite nearly 500 years of assiduous detraction, his prior role in the discovery of America remains the strongest part of Columbus’s credentials as an explorer, but we should recall some of the supporting evidence too.  His decoding of the Atlantic wind system”–

Anne Brannen  57:45 

Oh, right, of course.

Michelle Butler  57:47 

–“His discovery of magnetic variation in the Western Hemisphere.”

Anne Brannen  57:53 

That’s right, because there was a place where his compass wasn’t pointing north anymore.

Michelle Butler  57:58 

Yep, yep. “His contributions to the mapping of the Atlantic and the New World.”

Anne Brannen  58:04 

Fair enough.

Michelle Butler  58:05 

“His epic crossings of the Caribbean.”

Anne Brannen  58:08 

True.

Michelle Butler  58:09 

“His demonstration of the continental nature of parts of South and Central America.”

Anne Brannen  58:15 

True.

Michelle Butler  58:16 

“His aprecue about the imperfect sphericity of the globe.”

Anne Brannen  58:21 

Yes, he realized that the globe was not actually a sphere, and it’s more pear shaped. Now, it’s not as pear shaped as he thought, but it is pear shaped.

Michelle Butler  58:31 

“His uncanny, intuitive skill in navigation.”

Anne Brannen  58:35 

God. How the hell he got four voyages back and forth without ever dying himself? I just do not know.

Michelle Butler  58:41 

And that last one, it’s 21 days. That’s not that bad. I mean, really, that’s not bad at all. You’re sailing a ship the size of a postage stamp. “Any of these would qualify an explorer for enduring fame. Together, they constitute an unequaled record of achievement.” And I think that might actually be part of Columbus’s tragedy, that fighting over what he means has displaced what he actually, undeniably did.

Anne Brannen  59:16 

That actually makes a lot of sense to me. I’ll buy that. Did we decide what his crime was?

Michelle Butler  59:21 

Isabelle and Ferdinand considered it a crime that he disobeyed them. He disobeyed a direct order.

Anne Brannen  59:29 

Okay, so that’s his crime.

Michelle Butler  59:32 

Certainly, according to his bosses and he had, you know, he had entered into a contract with them.

Anne Brannen  59:38 

Okay, all right, excellent. Well, that’s our crime then. So this has been our discussion of the extremely, kind of complex, infuriating and hard to understand human that was Christopher Columbus. The next time you hear from us, we’re going to go to France, a little before all this. France, 1415, with the Battle of Agincourt. King Henry committed a war crime. And so we want to talk about the killing of the French prisoners at Agincourt, which is going to give me a chance to talk about the Battle of Agincourt, which I like very much. And we can discuss yet another war crime, although the last war crime, the last medieval war crime we talked about was actually counted at that time as a war crime. We’ll deal with this when we come to it. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. And you can find us on Spotify and Apple and all the places where the podcasts are hanging out. You can find us specifically at True Crime Medieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. There you can find links to the podcast and the show notes and the transcripts. Also there’s an index that has three parts. Now you can look things up by subject, by the humans who are doing the bad crimes, or by the subject in general, like, I don’t know, did anybody die? Or is it basically toxic family. Slso places. So we have that. You can leave comments for us, and you can, if you have any, you can suggest medieval crimes. We really love it when you do that. I think we’ve done the ones that have been given to us so far. If we haven’t done them already, they’re on our list. Yeah, so that’s us. Yeah. Christopher Columbus. Happy Indigenous People’s Day. Bye.

116. The Great German Peasants’ War, Central Europe 1524-1525

Anne Brannen  0:24 

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen. I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:33 

And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:37 

Today we’re in Central Europe, 1524 to 1525, and we are talking about the great peasants revolt, also called the German peasants war. Fine. And it’s the 500th anniversary of it this year. So that’s really good, and we did not know about it, and we’re very happy to talk about it. We learned a lot of things. We learned a lot of things when we were putting this together. And so I’m going to tell you what’s going on. And then Michelle found out some very interesting things. Be alert for snails in my part. Okay, the great peasants revolt. The German peasants war was mostly in German speaking countries in Central Europe, but not entirely. This included Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, but also beyond. And it wasn’t entirely peasants, but mostly the name is a shorthand. But we are in Central Europe, 1524 to 1525, and here’s your background. None of this is simple, by the way. Before the recording started. Michelle was saying that she was really glad that it was me having to do this. And I want to say, Michelle, I appreciate that. I enjoyed it. It was fascinating. The issues that sparked the revolt had to do with the treatment of the lower classes, though there were several aspects to that treatment. The Holy Roman Empire wasn’t a cohesive entity. It was made up, in the German speaking areas especially of fiefdoms. And every noble had the power to legislate in his own area and decide things on his own. As a rule, the nobles had been raising taxes and rents on the peasants for about 150 years. At this point, they did this by doubling down on the serfdom structure. The Greeks and Romans had had a similar structure, but really the serfdom structure became customary in Europe after the 10th century in Western Europe, although there were places such as Scandinavia which never used it. Yay Norway, just saying. Then it began to disappear in Western Europe. By the 14th century, it spread as a system to the east, becoming customary there. In the 15th century, the land in the east was more sparsely settled, and the Black Death had lessened the population even further. And serfdom, which, since it’s a system which binds the peasants to the land that they can’t go off to, you know, someplace else and find a job, was a method of keeping a fiefdom going. So the nobles took it on, and it would remain a common system in Central and Eastern Europe until the early 19th century, and in Russia until 1861, which is when it technically was abolished. Although I often in reading Russian history find it hard to figure out how it left. But at any rate, central Europe was at this point, losing serfdom, later than further west, but earlier than further east. It’s right in the middle. It’s central. So by 1524, in Central Europe, the conditions were worse economically for serfs than they had been. The structure of serfdom was strengthened, meaning that the serfs had no ability to move. Very important also, the custom of allowing the peasantry access to a commons for their livestock and access to community resources like woods and streams was taken away. So no way to move, no way to take care of your sheep and cattle, higher taxes and rents, larger and larger numbers of obligations. I will be getting to the snails in a minute. This was all made worse by the fact that things had been getting better economically before then for the peasants in the West. The labor shortages in the West had added to their value, unlike what happened in the East, where the nobility doubled down. There was also the ripple effect from the increasing questioning of hierarchy. There had been, for instance, many precursors to the Protestant Reformation, but the defining moment is, of course, Martin Luther’s 95 theses–that was in 1517, so not long before the revolt. But the idea that hierarchy could be questioned and that there’s not necessarily a divine requirement that hierarchies remain as they are, that had been leaving, and Luther codified it in a way that affected masses, especially in German speaking populations. So things were bad for the peasants and getting worse. It all tipped over in the late summer of 1524 in Stirlingen. This is in southwest Germany, near the Black Forest. There had been really difficult harvests for a while, and the peasants were exhausted and not doing well at all. And the Countess of Lupfen chose that time–late summer of 1524, things not going well already–to order her serfs to go out and collect snail shells. She wanted to use them as spools for thread. Now I have to put a sidebar in here, because I’m like, Oh, really. Because this sounds really, really stupid. Snail shells do not make a good spool for threads. They’re fragile and they’re irregular, so your thread is going to fall off easily and get cut, and they’re small. I mean, you know what really works is thread spools, as either cones or those wooden cylinders. You know, you really want no snail shells, no. So I think this is really dumb. So first of all, it was dumb, and then second of all, it was humiliating. And third of all, they were exhausted. They were supposed to get all these damn snail shells, so that wasn’t really the best time to do it. And 1200 serfs exhausted, as you remember, low on resources and not wanting to be humiliated by going and getting the snail shells, which were going to be useless anyway. Now I want to know, did the seamstresses revolt? I did not find that. And I want to know because I would have been at the gates myself. At any rate, they refused to work, and they were all at the gate. They had a banner, even. I mean, they were together, and Hans Mueller von Bugenbach formed what was called an evangelical brotherhood, gathering peasants in the area. The revolt quickly spread across southwestern Germany, and it went beyond serfs in February in 1525. Villagers in Memingen, in Swabia, it’s in Bavaria, rebelled against the city council and presented demands that in March of 1525, would become the 12 articles. This is the first human rights and civil liberties document written in continental Europe after the Roman Empire. You remember that there was one written in England in 1381 in the English peasants revolt. But for the continent, this is the first. And I will give you the articles in brief, so that you may judge, are these out of line? I think not, but perhaps you disagree. Okay. One, towns and villages should be able to get rid of incompetent preachers. Two, there should be one tax which would pay the preacher, help the poor, and pay war taxes, and that’s it. No other damn taxes. Three, no serfdom–freedom. Four, everybody should be allowed to hunt and fish. Five, any forest that the nobles just took over should be given back to the common usage. Six, labor requirements should go back to what they were in the last generation. Seven, no more arbitrary labor demanded by nobles. We remember the snail search, okay? Eight, if fields can’t produce enough to pay the rent, the rent should be lowered to a fair amount. Nine, judgments on everybody should be according to the written law, and not some damn stuff that the nobles made up. By the way, I’m adding all the damns and stuff because I’m kind of trying to emphasize, you know, really the feeling here. 10, any common land appropriated by the nobles should be given back. 11, no more damn death tax, damn it, because it robs the widows and orphans. Damn it. 12, if it can be explained to us clearly that anything in this list violates God’s laws or is unjust, that article should be void. Michelle, does this not seem reasonable?

Michelle Butler  9:15 

I thought that their list of demands was entirely reasonable.

Anne Brannen  9:19 

I think they should have some ice cream too.

Michelle Butler  9:23 

I felt a deep kinship with them when one of the things they were complaining about was being forced to go out and collect morel mushrooms. My mom’s side of the family is a bunch of German Catholics, and morel mushrooms are a big, big deal in our family, and I am choosing to believe that the obsession with morel mushrooms comes from this kind of memory of being forced to collect them for the rich people and so Fuck you, we’re eating them ourselves.

Anne Brannen  9:51 

I did not know about the morel mushrooms. I like that. Maybe it’s because I was so focused on the damn snails and their uselessness as thread spools.

Michelle Butler  9:59 

Yeah, I thought that was weird, too. I wondered, Is there anything else they’re good for? Because it occurred to me also that they would be truly unsuited for wrapping thread around.

Anne Brannen  10:10 

No. As someone who has worked with textiles for 65 years, I can tell you that they are completely unsuited, and so don’t give me any for Christmas. Okay, all right, so this document got sent out. There were 25,000 copies of this document in two months. That’s a lot of printing for this time. It addresses comprehensively the issues that the peasants needed addressed. And it’s a damn good document, and it was popular, so things were getting violent. There was all the getting at the gates with a banner and whatnot, the infantry and the cavalry were mustered, and in early April, the Battle of Leipheim took place. This is also in Swabia, and there were about three or four thousand peasants there. They had cannons, they had muskets, they had light artillery. But they were facing Swabian military, which first took care of a section of the peasants, which about like 1000 of them, by cutting them off from the main force and so that took care of them. The rest of the peasants were outnumbered. They were outgunned, and they retreated. About half of them got to safety in Leipheim. The rest drowned in the Danube or were shot down. Not long after that, the peasants took Weinsberg. This was a big deal. Very big deal, because its garrison was off in Italy. That’s why they could do it. They executed the count and the nobles who were with him by making them run a gauntlet. In this case, the gauntlet, they had pikes, they had they had things to stab them with, and so everybody had to run, getting stabbed by all these people till they fell down and died. The Count’s wife and his three year old son were allowed to escape. But that was really very, very bad, and people were very upset. More on that in a bit. Then the peasants burnt down the castle of Wildenburg. But it’s the Weinsberg executions that really, really incensed Martin Luther. Things I didn’t know about Martin Luther–this would be the main thing. He hadn’t been happy with the treatment of the peasants, but he did not like the peasants getting violent, and the massacre at Weinsberg was just too much, and so he wrote a pamphlet. The pamphlet was called ‘Agaainst the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants,’ in which he argues that the rebelling peasants should be strangled like bad dogs. I don’t think that’s one of your most charitable Christian pamphlets, and I’m very surprised, but any rate that exists, and now we know, but the peasants continued to attack churches and castles and were having to eat off the land because peasants. This happened in the peasants revolt, in the peasants crusade too. How do you get from one place to another in a large mass of people if you don’t actually have any money? Well, you eat what’s there. So a lot of the attacking of monasteries and church, this is all getting things to eat. And then there was a massacre at Frankenhausen, where the peasants had besieged the castle of Schwartzberg, and they were facing the Landsknechte, and they were well trained, well equipped mercenaries, and so that wasn’t going well. So the peasants agreed to a ceasefire, and then the next day, the troops, the Landsknechte, united with a Saxon army. They broke the truce and they massacred maybe about 6000 peasants, though the figures aren’t reliable, but someplace around that. The soldiers, by the way, lost six people, and I think, like, two of them weren’t even dead. And of course, if you weren’t dead in the battle, you got executed. I mean, because that’s how these things work. Later in May, at the Battle of Bublingen, the peasants lost maybe about 3000 and the Swabian League lost 40. I mean, they just were so outnumbered. At Böblingen, after that battle, the leader of the peasants of the Weinsberg massacre–that was the one with the gauntlets, this was Jacklein Rohrbach, Little Jack Rohrbach–he was captured. Most of the executions of captured peasants were hanging or beheading, but Rohrbach was chained to a stake and burned alive. The peasants then lost the battle of Konigshofer at the beginning of June. Later in May, they actually won the siege of Freiburg, but they lost the battle of Wurzburg, and they lost more than 8000 peasants there. The whole thing was over by September, so that’s a really short time for a war. But it really had, it had made a big impact as these things do. So the outcome–oh, and by the way, this was so condensed and so simplified, and you can go find out lots of details, but the more I got into details, the less information I was going to be able to actually give you, if you understand what I mean. So the outcome, not surprisingly–there was a crackdown on the peasants, and the economies of Central Europe were devastated. The war had also underlined the problems with the inherited hierarchies, because even though they were sort of remaining, except, you know, the one that Luther was taking down, it was obvious that they could be questioned. And even though these were economic issues in the peasants war, they’re connected to the inherited hierarchies in the church. Though the peasants war had failed, that it had occurred and had had been so costly and devastating, also made clear the problems with the decentralization of the Holy Roman Empire, which added to the regional power of the nobility, who became less connected to the Empire, rather than more. Naturally, the hatred of the peasantry toward the nobility just got worse and worse– wouldn’t it have–and this didn’t lead to stability. The violence and the blood of the war had a lasting effect as well, and distrust among classes and religions, and all of this would culminate in the 30 Years War that will start in 1618. It’s nearly 100 years later, and it’s overtly a religious war, Protestant and Catholic, rather than economic. But nevertheless, it was nurtured by the landscape that this particular war created. That’s the main outcome. But there’s something else I want to talk about, which is that the German peasants war isn’t well known in the West. We didn’t know about it, and there’s only now a full study available in English of the war, of the revolt, which was published this year. It’s called Summer of Fire and Blood: The German peasants war and is by Lyndal Rogers, published this year. That’s not just the first, it is the only one of full studies of the war in English. So it’s not been large in the West, but in German, not surprisingly, there are full studies. There have been full studies, and there’s also been some rival understandings of the war between West Germany and East Germany. Now, doesn’t that just make sense? Also, I want to just say that the Nazis really like this thing too. But I don’t. I’m not going to go far into that. Sometimes we do. In essence, Engel saw this as an early bourgeois revolution, a class revolution meant to further capitalist goals, an economic war. The West German historians focused on the crisis of feudalism and the rise of the common man, a political war. But it’s all very confused, and there is no common reading of this war. It is so complex, and there are so many ways to argue what was going on at the beginning and even what became of it, that we don’t have a consensus of scholarly argument, but it’s now something being talked about in the West. Yay. So we should be seeing more scholarship centering on the peasants revolt, its causes, its outcomes. In the meantime, I would like anybody who wants to try it to go and get some snail shells and wind a bunch of thread around them, and then tell me how that works out, because I don’t think it’s gonna. Michelle, you found some stuff?

Michelle Butler  17:57 

That is experimental archeology right there. Go try it and see how it turns out. I’m relieved to know that you found this copious mass of history overwhelming as well, because I found this…I actually felt really dumb,

Anne Brannen  18:15 

You’re not actually dumb in reality. So I’m sorry you felt went that way.

Michelle Butler  18:19 

Because I can’t get this. I can’t get a handle on it. It’s so huge, and part of it’s just the overwhelming awfulness of the fact that they slaughtered 100,000 peasants rather than come to some kind of accommodation about letting them get enough resources to survive. Because that’s where they were at, was that they had squeezed the peasantry to the point where people literally could not survive, and they were so worried about their ability to continue that they had no choice. People don’t rise up like this for no reason.

Anne Brannen  18:52 

No, and a revolt doesn’t go so quickly and with such violence, unless there’s something really going on.

Michelle Butler  19:00 

What I ended up looking at is there are a few named leaders that got involved with this, and so that is where I ended up. One of them is Thomas Munzer. I’m just going to go real quickly through the first couple, because I have one that I spent the vast majority of my research time on. Thomas Munzer is one of the leaders. He is one of the ones that doesn’t survive this. He ends up being executed. But this is an interesting example of the difference between East and West Germany. There’s an East German film about him from 1956 that is absolutely state propaganda. It is one of 13 heritage films made by a state owned film company, and intending to show how German history was always moved moving towards a socialist/communist state. It was released on DVD in 2005 with bunch of historical context, commentary, things like that. But apparently it is way more interesting as a piece of history than as a movie per se. Most of the websites don’t come right out and say that it’s super boring, but the indications are that it’s fairly boring. Florian Geyer is one of two knights who threw in his lot with the peasants. He is the subject of an 1896 play by Gerhard Hauptman, who is fascinating because he went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912. That play was produced regularly until at least 1968. Geyer is also the subject–there’s at least one folk song about Florian Geyer and–this is amazing–there are annual performances based on his role. Do you remember the performances that were about the Victual brothers?

Anne Brannen  21:01 

Yes, yes, yes.

Michelle Butler  21:02 

It’s like that. It’s outdoor, kind of touristy. So I’ve provided a link for that. An entirely separate set of plays are happening as part of the 500 year anniversary celebration that’s going on in Wurzburg this year. I’m going to give you a link to all the things that are happening. It’s an ongoing celebration. Stuff has been happening since February. The vast majority of my time was spent down the midsummer nights dream rabbit hole of Götz von Berlichingen. Can you can you pronounce that for me? After this, I’m just going to call him Sir Gotz. I promise that my next language on Duolingo will be German.

Anne Brannen  21:49 

The Irish is not helping here, is it?

Michelle Butler  21:52 

No. I almost don’t even know where to start with this guy. Sir Gotz, is–I called him a Midsummer Night’s Dream character, because he is one of those, ‘If I saw this condemned upon the stage, I would condemn it as an improbable fiction’ real life people. He was a knight and colorful character, TM. He was born around 1480, the 10th child of the family, which is important, because there is nothing for him to inherit. He has to go off and and make his own way in the world. So by 1525, he really is old enough to have grown some sense, but apparently not. He is an active fighter for almost half a century. We know that he is fighting at least by 1497, so he’s about 17 when he signs up to be a fighter for, I think, the Holy Roman Emperor. He works for different people over the course of his life. He is an active fighter from 1495 to 1544, if you do the math on that, that means that he is fighting into his 60s. 64 is when he finally retires. He makes enough money at this though that in 1517 he buys Hornberg Castle, which is kind of nice. It’s still there. You can go visit it. It tells you something about how much there is to get through about Sir Gotz, because I only kind of touch the tourism section of this that it’s still there. You can go visit it. There is a museum, both in his adult home and his childhood home, two separate museums.

Anne Brannen  23:35 

Are there any tea shops?

Michelle Butler  23:36 

I have no clue. But it is there. It is semi ruined. So it’s been about 100 years uninhabited. There are places of it that are kind of a mess, but there’s a functioning Museum in it. That is where he lived until 1562, when he died in his sleep in his 80s, which is an accomplishment for somebody living this kind of life. He not only is involved in a bunch of official wars, he is a thorny and prickly individual who gets involved in at least 16 personal feuds, which is no longer a smart thing to do, because that’s been outlawed fairly recently. Grain of salt. A fair amount of what we know about him, or think we know about him, comes from his autobiography. And humility was not a virtue he aspired to. His autobiography is itself, the fact that it exists, pretty fascinating. It’s not as unusual as it seems like it would be. Military memoirs are becoming a thing in the 16th century, but his is better written, which is one of the reasons that it continued and continues to be read. So even though he is not the most famous or the best German military commander of the 16th century, he writes himself into history. He also is a character TM. At age 23 before the peasants war, he loses his right hand, his sword hand, to a cannonball. He describes this as the cannonball hit his sword and pushes it so far into his right arm, near the elbow, that he loses the hand and the wrist.

Anne Brannen  25:22 

Oh, my God.

Michelle Butler  25:24 

One of the historians who talks about him describes this as ‘not only did he survive this, but he didn’t even retire.’ At least one source describes this as a friendly fire incident. I had some trouble working out whether the cannonball that he got hit with was coming from the enemy, or whether it was an accident with the side that he was actually on. So somebody who’s a military historian would would be able to work this out, I’m sure. But the important thing is that we are in that time period in which warfare is changing very quickly. Because he’s born around 1480, he starts to fight around 1498–we remember from our work on the siege of Rhodes that this means that Sir Gotz is perfectly positioned to be maximally screwed by the changes, because his training would have happened before the majority of the changes in how warfare was being conducted were happening, but most of his fighting life is after it. That’s not great. The poor man was trained, as you know, a late medieval knight, and ends up being an early modern fighter in the land of cannon. So that sucks. After the loss of his sword hand, he has to retrain himself to fight with his left hand, and he commissions a prosthetic.

Anne Brannen  26:58 

Uh huh.

Michelle Butler  26:59 

His first prosthetic is pretty basic. In the 1530s, so after the peasants war, he commissions a nicer prosthetic. This is one of the reasons that he’s famous, because the engineering of this is phenomenal. It is some cutting edge Renaissance, or 16th century, early modern or in that mushy place. You know, one of the ironies about the Renaissance and the early modern period is that it is the technological burst of the late Middle Ages that allows that to happen, and then they try to claim all of those accomplishments, which really grinds my gears, as if the printing press just sort of appeared, like the dew. Anyway, okay–

Anne Brannen  27:51 

Obviously, you know, God said, Let there be a printing press.

Michelle Butler  27:53 

This prosthetic was functional. I have a quote here that describes how it worked from, actually from the National Institutes of Health, back when we still did that. “His second iron hand extended just below the elbow and was secured with a leather strap. He had a blacksmith construct three individually articulated joints on each of the four main fingers and two on its thumb, providing better grip. Additionally, the position of each digit could be locked into place using spring loaded mechanisms built directly into the prosthesis. Two buttons were used to reset the thumb and the four fingers back to their original position”– ie opening the hand– “a third button would also angle the wrist by about 15 degrees, as a way, we believe, to further increase the number of actions achievable by the upper extremity prosthesis. He could fine tune the position of his right hand and fingers, allowing him to grip a variety of objects, such as his sword, quill, or even the reins of his war horse or a shield.” That’s something else that gets described. This is just fascinating. This prosthesis. This is some serious engineering. He has to lock it. He has to manipulate those buttons with his surviving left hand, but he can lock that prosthetic hand in place so that he can do things with his right arm. Both of his prosthetics survive and can be seen at Jagsthausen Castle. More on the prosthesis later, because it’s one of the reasons that the internet loves this guy. He gets involved in the peasant’s war as a commander. Why? Well, that’s an excellent question. He later claims in the autobiography and in his trial, that he was forced to help and he wasn’t a believer in their cause. They just, you know, threatened his family.

Anne Brannen  29:56 

Yeah, he’s like, he’s so helpless.

Michelle Butler  30:00 

What else would he say? He’s certainly not the only knight to throw in his lot with the peasants in a realization that their position in this society was in trouble. You know, they know by this point that knighthood as it had existed for 300 years was–that they were the last generation. It was never going to be the kind of military, indomitable force that it had been. We talked about with the siege of Rhodes, how in the first siege of Rhodes in 1480 I think it was, the year that Sir Gotz was born, they carried bows and had a pistol as their backup and when the siege happens in 1522, it’s the exact opposite. Their frontline weapon is a pistol and their backup weapon is a crossbow. Okay, so when he died, he left this autobiography. He probably dictated it, not because he was illiterate, but he seems to have lost his sight by then, but he was published in 1731.

Anne Brannen  31:03 

Oh, my God, so he didn’t see it published?

Michelle Butler  31:07 

No, he never saw it published. He dies. When does he…

Anne Brannen  31:10 

Way before 1700, I’m just guessing.

Michelle Butler  31:14 

So we got a couple 100 years and it’s published. This is where things go really wild. He was already an interesting figure. But what happens next is what turns him into, eventually, a 21st Century internet phenomena. Goethe reads the biography, the autobiography, 40 years later, 1771 and he writes his first major play, which is based on this, somewhat loosely based on this autobiography, and it turned Sir Gotz into a national hero who is caught up in a time of intense political and social upheaval. It’s fairly long. An 1804 production ran to almost six hours, and I thought the Castle of Perseverance was pushing it at four.

Anne Brannen  32:00 

Yeah, six is a lot.

Michelle Butler  32:03 

This play was translated into English in 1799. You will never guess who by.

Anne Brannen  32:08 

No, I’m not even gonna try. Who is it?

Michelle Butler  32:11 

Walter Scott.

Anne Brannen  32:13 

Hahaha. Oh, surely not. Not Walter Scott.

Michelle Butler  32:16 

Yes it was. Everything about this is more and more fantastical. I’m serious, if you wrote this as a novel, people would tell you, you’re kind of gilding the lily here.

Anne Brannen  32:30 

Walter Scott. Jesus,

Michelle Butler  32:34 

There is a condensed version–very, very condensed version–of Goethe’s play on YouTube, if anybody, unlike me, actually understands German, done not with Lego figures, but with Playmobil. But it’s basically the same concept. Sir Gotz has an actual dedicated Playmobile Action Figure. They have not repurposed a random knight as him. He has his own.

Anne Brannen  33:03 

Wow.

Michelle Butler  33:04 

I know. That’s amazing. I’m pretty sure Playmobile is a German company, but oh, oh my god. So this is Goethe’s first major play. It’s not his most popular. The most popular of course is Faustus, but it’s still pretty influential. There’s a filmed version of it. There’s a difference, of course, between a filmed version of the play and a film made from the play. So there’s a film in 1979, the cover of which is stunningly awful. But 1979. The play is almost 200 years old by that point–almost exactly 200 years old. So that’s a thing. It’s an inspiration for other writers. Sartre’s 1951 play The Devil and the Good Lord. The English writer John Arden has a 1965 play called Iron Hand. And then there’s opera. Because, of course, there’s opera. This man’s life is operatic by definition. One of which is Carl Goldmark’s 1902 opera. One of the reasons that he’s really, really famous after Goethe’s play, is that Goethe has a very effective scene in which Sir Gotz, there’s a demand for his surrender, and he says to the messenger who has come to demand his surrender–in striking contrast to how Henry the Fifth handles the same exact incident in Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth, where he’s all very polite, ‘thou shall never hear herald anymore.’ You know, ‘go back, sir herald’. What Sir Gotz says instead is ‘tell your captain that for His Imperial Majesty, I have, as always, due respect, but also tell him he can lick me in the ass.’

Anne Brannen  34:47 

Thank you, Goethe.

Michelle Butler  34:49 

This is actually based on an incident that Sir Gotz records in his autobiography. Goethe moves it to a different situation, but indeed, Sir Gotz claims to have said this. Nobody is claiming that he has originated this insult, but he is, via Goethe, the popularizer, you would say, of what becomes known as the Swabian salute.

Anne Brannen  35:13 

Oh, that’s lovely.

Michelle Butler  35:17 

The more you look, the more you find with this guy. I have four pages of notes. There is a satirical magazine named for him in Austria from 1923 to 1934. There is at least one book of historical fiction from 2019 called Iron Hand. There is a movie made in 2014 in German. It is available on Amazon with English subtitles. I watched the trailer so you don’t have to. It looks very Braveheart-y. Proceed at your own risk. However, I just want to point out again, 2014 is when they made this movie. I’m not saying it’s terrible. I’m saying it’s very Braveheart-y. So for example, they move the creation of the second prosthesis earlier, so that he already has that really, really cutting edge, amazing prosthesis, rather than the really basic one, before he gets involved with the peasants in the 1525.

Anne Brannen  36:16 

Well, that’s a better narrative arc than the one that actually existed. So, hey, I get it.

Michelle Butler  36:20 

Yeah. That second prosthesis is actually from the 1530s but they move it earlier, so that what happens is that the government forces are like, ‘we can take these guys. Look, it’s a bunch of peasants led by a one handed knight. What are they going to do to us?’ And so the castle blacksmith takes offense and builds this amazing prosthesis so that now he can lead them effectively. On a scale of Total Unknown to Olga, the internet loves Sir Gotz at about an eight, so if she’s a 10, he’s about an eight.

Anne Brannen  36:55 

Wait, wait, you have to explain what you mean. You’re talking about the popularity of St Olga on the internet, right?

Michelle Butler  37:01 

Yes.

Anne Brannen  37:02 

The one who massacred the Drevlians, but is a saint anyway.

Michelle Butler  37:09 

Yes. And also, I would say that there’s a little bit of a difference, because the way that St Olga gets handled on the internet is very breathless and often inaccurate, and the way that Sir Gotz gets talked about on the internet is often breathless, but more accurate than not.

Anne Brannen  37:26 

Well, cool.

Michelle Butler  37:29 

But he shows up in blog posts like ‘Meet the Middle Ages toughest knight,’ or featured in a website I didn’t know existed, but I’m happy to now: Badass of the Week.

Anne Brannen  37:43 

Cool. Badass of the Week.

Michelle Butler  37:44 

Badass of the Week. That word shows up more than once in blog posts and Tumblr posts and Reddit threads and all of these things about him. Sometimes he gets called the German Robin Hood.

Anne Brannen  37:56 

No!

Michelle Butler  37:57 

Yeah. There’s a whole other category of places he shows up on the internet because of the prosthesis. There are studies of the prosthesis. I found at least one article that is creating or attempting a 3d recreation of the inner workings of the prosthetic to try to figure out how it actually worked as a material object. There are at least six halfway decent, small, informative documentaries about him on YouTube. I included a couple of the links. I have so many links about this guy, but it’s one of these things where you’re basically safe to Google him.

Anne Brannen  38:41 

Well, hey. Because often that’s just not true.

Michelle Butler  38:44 

Yeah, and it sounds so hyperbolic, you know, if I had found this disconnected from the other work, think you’re probably exaggerating. Turns out, not so much, not so much. He is an interesting, interesting character. He and Thomas Malory would have gotten on really well.

Anne Brannen  39:08 

Oh my god, that would be wonderful, wouldn’t it be nice if they were friends.

Michelle Butler  39:16 

Oh, my goodness.

Anne Brannen  39:18 

So most of the show notes, rather than being on the Great Revolt itself, are going to be on this dude, huh?

Michelle Butler  39:26 

I do have good sources for the the actual revolt but in terms of sheer number, I do have quite a few of them.

Anne Brannen  39:36 

That’s all right, that’s all right. We love this. The rabbit holes are a very important piece of this whole thing we’re involved in.

Michelle Butler  39:43 

It kind of blows that the poster child for this war ends up being this knight, but he does survive. You know who he reminds me of? You know how in the first book of Discworld there is Cohen the barbarian, and he’s a subject of fun because he’s a very old mercenary, until somebody points out, do you know how badass he has to be to have survived this long as a mercenary? That’s what this guy is like. How badass do you have to be to go from being the 10th child and having no prospects to dying in your sleep, in your own goddamn castle, in your 80s. All hail, the badass of the week. And good, good with money, too. He doesn’t blow all of his money. He clearly is fairly good with saving and investing, because he doesn’t end up dying by the side of the road impoverished, which can happen if you don’t keep your earnings and then not go off and buy the medieval equivalent of a Ferrari. Although the investment in the prosthetic was a good call.

Anne Brannen  40:53 

Yeah, that wasn’t wasted money, I would think.

Michelle Butler  40:57 

I will, of course, provide links to the pictures of the prosthesis.

Anne Brannen  41:02 

Well, I’m glad you found him, because, you know, sometimes we get involved in things, and there’s just really kind of not things that make you happy. I’m very glad you got happy by this.

Michelle Butler  41:13 

Yeah, I wasn’t loving the actual thing that happened, because it’s just horrifying from start to finish. The vast majority of what happens in the uprising is property crimes. It’s like the Jacquerie. There are couple places where there’s actual bloodshed, but mostly it’s property crimes, and they just murder scores of people until somebody sort of goes, ‘Wait, wait, wait. If we actually kill everybody like we want to, nobody will be around to farm for us. We’re gonna starve. Oh, this is dumb.’

Anne Brannen  41:48 

Is that what we have?

Michelle Butler  41:49 

That is what I have for you.

Anne Brannen  41:51 

I am happy with it. I really am. This is what we have had for you, trying to explain this humongous thing. That’s our discussion of the great German peasants revolt war.

Michelle Butler  42:02 

I cannot believe that I had not heard of the largest peasant uprising before the French Revolution.

Anne Brannen  42:09 

That’s right, I forgot to say that part. Yeah, the largest before the French Revolution.

Michelle Butler  42:12 

I’m astonished to know that I had never heard of this.

Anne Brannen  42:16 

No, you’d think, really, we would have heard about this. But no, no, the 30 Years War sucks all the air out of the room. That was what we had to say about the great German peasants revolt war. And so there you are and our wonderful badass knight. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. And you can find us on Spotify and Apple and all the places where the podcasts hang out. And you can also get to us through truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word, and you can find there links to the podcast, links to the show notes and the transcripts, and there’s an index, and there is now an improved index, because not only do we have an index of the episodes, but there is an index of places, in case you just want to see, what did we say about France. And there’s also the thing that we love best, both of us, which is the subject index, which, if you want to find out, things like which are the ones where people got hung or which are the ones about dysfunctional families, or which are the ones when nobody dies? If you want to have nobody dying, we have a subject index, and I’m very proud of it. I enjoyed the hell out of that. Yeah, so you can find us there, and you can leave comments, we love those, and let us know if there’s any crimes that you, medieval crimes that you know of, that you think we should look at. You can find out in the index if we’ve already done them, unless we just did them in the last couple of weeks, in which case, I haven’t got them in there yet. Because we have to wait till the ADHD Queen gets everything up. But at any rate, let us know if there’s something that you would like us to look at. Because we generally do. May be a while before we get to it, but we generally do the things that our listeners talk to us about. Yeah, I think that’s us. Yeah. Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

113. Rogallach mac Uatach Is Assasinated By Máel Brigte mac Mothlachán , Connacht, Ireland 649

Anne Brannen  0:24 

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen, your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:33 

And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:35 

It’s pretty hot where we are. It’s 104 over here. What is it over where you are, Michelle?

Michelle Butler  0:40 

Wow, wow. It’s not that hot. It’s, um, the high 80s here. It’s just profoundly humid. It hasn’t stopped raining for two months.

Anne Brannen  0:50 

Every time we have rain that goes on for quite a while, I think of that podcast we did, the episode we did, about the great famine and how it rained continually for a year, and then it rained continually for another year, and then it continued to rain continually, and lots of people died. I always think about that, because, you know, I’m in New Mexico. We really would like some rain, but we don’t want that much rain. But today…every once in a while, here at True Crime Medieval…you know, we’ve got this list of things that we want to talk about, because we find crimes, and they look really interesting, and we think, Ooh, let’s talk about that. We thought, oh this will be interesting. Well, today we are in Ireland. We’re in Connacht in 649 because Rogallach was murdered. That actually is a true thing. So, fine, fine, fine. That’s true, and that’s what we know. That’s pretty much it. But we do have some other things to talk about, which will explain why that’s the only thing we’ll know. But also I have, of course, some context. So we’re in Connacht, 649. It’s 649 for our purposes, though we’re going to talk about some stuff before that and after that. One of the kings of Connacht got killed, and he got killed either by some servants who got annoroyed or by a member of the Corco Cullu tribe into whose territory Rogallach had been invading and trying to get more stuff. But at any rate, he was indeed dead, and he was murdered. So we’ll get to that in a bit, but for now, let’s have some context, because we do love some context. In the time period we’re in today, which is, quote, ‘early historic.’ Okay, fine, meaning that people write things down only they hadn’t been, you know, till recently. Connacht wasn’t really a kingdom. It had several layers of kingship for several tribes, the bigger tribes were led by high kings, and then the smaller tribes were led by lesser kings. All these leaders were kings, and they were all kind of equal, but some were more equal than others. We call the area Connacht, from one of the tribes, the Connachta, which would become a major dynasty from 1030 on, but right at the time now, when we’re talking about our poor, murdered king, it’s more disparate. We’ve got more layers of stuff going on. Now, our Rogallach came from the Ui Brien branch of the Connachta, which at that time were beginning to become a major force in what would become Connacht. By the way, Saint Patrick visited the, quote, “halls of the sons of Brien, that is the Ui Brien. So, you know, that’s a feather in their cap. Saint Patrick went there. In fact, I believe that you can actually still go to the place where he was. That’d be nice, I’m sure. Their ancestor, by the way, is Brien, or Brian. Brien, who might have existed, but nemight not have. He’s one of what we call the semi legendary kings. He was a half brother of Niall of the Nine Hostages. His province included Ulster and– Sidebar: the O’Neills of the North and the province of Ulster had and have a red hand as part of their heraldry. It’s still on the Ulster flag, and the bloody red hand might be connected to Niall of the Nine Hostages, but maybe not. There’s various stories about why there’s this red hand in the heraldry and on the flag. Conall Cernach–he didn’t exist, by the way, he’s also legendary–but he put his bloodied hand on the banner, on a banner after killing Lugaid, who had killed Cúchulainn, who also did not exist. But he’s really important, even though he wasn’t there. Or the three Colla brothers–they didn’t exist either–put their bloodied hands on a banner after the Battle of Achadh Leith-dheirg, which is actually a place which does exist. So there’s that. Supposedly they and the Connachta took part of County Down at that battle. Or. Or at some legendary point when Ulster was being fought over, there is a dictum that the first warrior to land lay a hand on Ulster could have it, so one of the warriors cut off his hand and threw it onto the territory, thereby winning Ulster. In one version of the story, that didn’t happen. The warrior who wins by amputating one of his hands is Niall of the Nine Hostages, who wasn’t there. Obviously, none of this happened. But you know, we have these theories and stories to explain why the flag of Ulster has a bloody hand on it, and that’s the best story, really. So I like the one with Niall of the Nine Hostages, who didn’t exist, throwing his bloody hand, which also didn’t exist, onto what would become Ulster, which was there. So that’s the story I’m going to go with, although none of these things happened anyway. End of that sidebar. Niall of the Nine Hostages. Anyway, where were we? Yeah, okay, the Ui Briens. So they were part of the Connachta, and St Patrick visited them. As with all the other tribes  in Connacht, they had a king from one of the three main branches of the Connachta. The Ui Briens were one of those. The other two being descended from Fiachrae, who was also a half brother of Niall of the Nine Hostages, who wasn’t there, and Ailill, who was also one of the half brothers of Niall of the Nine Hostages, still not there. Our Rogallach, who was one of his half brothers, was from the Ui Brien clan. The king before him was Colmán mac Cobthaig from the Ui Fiachrach clan. Some sources say that the king before him was the father of our Rogallach, and I’m so sorry to tell you that I don’t know what he died of, but he did in the year 600 and Colman succeeded him. So the kingship went from the Brien branch to the Fiachrae branch. In 622 that king was slain at the Battle of Connacht by our Rogallach. That’s in what’s now County Roscommon, if you’re trying to track down places. The places are there, I mean, usually. So Rogallach became king of Connacht in 649 and it’s sort of refreshing, isn’t it, to have come amongst the actual kings, because he really was there. Yay, yay. So he was there and he married a woman from one of the O’Neill branches. That’s great. Okay, so now we’re going to have another side bar. We didn’t really need the last one about Niall of the Nine Hostages. I just really like him. So I had that rabbit hole, though I take full responsibility for it. I’m telling you this one is necessary, because anything interesting that we know about Rogallach, and indeed, most of early Irish history, comes to us from Geoffrey Keating’s History of Ireland. So I have some explaining to do. Geoffrey Keating was a Catholic priest born in Tipperary in the middle of the 16th century, about 1569. He was educated at the newly established Irish college at Bordeaux, where he became a Doctor of Divinity, and he was still working on his doctorate when he wrote some of his important poems. One was “Farewell to Ireland,” which he wrote when he got to Bordeaux, for instance. There was a poem called “Lament on the Sad State of Ireland,” which was when the ruling families of the O’Neills and the O’Donnells left Ireland for the continent–in other words, the flight of the Earls, this is called. It’s when the Irish ruling class was broken. Keating was stationed as a priest in Tipperary after getting his degree, and besides his priestly duties, which actually, he apparently was very good at, he continued to write, which he was good at under the standards of his time. Okay, his most important work is Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, the History of Ireland. It really means the foundation of knowledge on Ireland, but we call it the History of Ireland. It was from 1634, and like medieval literature before it, it starts with the creation of the world, and then after that, it goes on until the Norman invasion in the 12th century, and God help us, Keating based his history on some documents of history–chronicles, for instance, and some church records–but also Irish mythology. In this history, Keating takes down previous historians who said bad things about Ireland, the best of this being Geraldus Cambrensis, Gerald of Wales, for instance, who wrote that Ireland was primitive and that the Norman conquerors were justified because they brought civilization, although he did like Irish illuminated manuscripts, so I don’t know. Go figure. Apparently the Irish were able to get something done, in his eyes. In Keating’s history, Ireland has existed for untold millennia as a unified kingdom. Yes. Settlers came in various waves, the last of them being the Normans and the church is a major part of Ireland being so unified. But this history is not full of what we would now call history. Even in the late 17th century, though, an English lawyer called it quote, “an ill-digested heap of very silly fictions,” end of quote. But it had an enormous impact on Irish literature and Irish histories. If you mess around, for instance, in Irish genealogy, you cannot escape coming across John O Hart’s works on Irish pedigrees, which gives as fact, things that he got from Keating, such as the Irish all descend from Malaysius, the 36th descendant from Adam, who went to Ireland from Spain in 17,000 BC.

Michelle Butler  10:45 

Oh, no, really?

Anne Brannen  10:46 

Oh yeah, oh, for sure. Oh, you hadn’t heard this.

Michelle Butler  10:49 

No.

Anne Brannen  10:49 

Oh yeah. From the Spanish. Well, yeah.

Michelle Butler  10:52 

I knew about that. I didn’t know that you had somebody, more or less, now putting that into genealogy.

Anne Brannen  11:00 

Oh yeah. And then goes on to present other mythological and legendary figures as human ancestors of ancestral humans. It’s just infuriating, quite frankly. You’re all the time having to explain to people that no, the Irish didn’t really come from Spain. Anyway. David Coleman, editor of a translation of the history in 1901 says in his introduction–so this is one of the ways that we kind of like we look at Keating in 1901.  Okay, quote–this is all a quote, I’ll tell you when I finish the quote: “Geoffrey Keating stands alone among Gaelic writers. He had neither precursor nor successor, nor in his own domain, either equal or second. His historical treatise, with which we are here concerned marks, an epoch in our literature, a complete departure from the conventional usage of the analyst. He recounts the story in his own happy manner, as it was handed down in annals and poems, not merely history, but mythology, archeology, geography, statistics, genealogy, bardic chronicles, ancient poetry, romance and tradition.” End of quote. Give me a minute now. I have to put my head down on the desk.

Michelle Butler  11:00 

Oh my god.

Anne Brannen  12:27 

Yes. And this was good. It was a good thing that he was doing this. So, an important work, both in the history of Irish literature and historiography and obviously storytelling, but not of history as we understand it these days. So we are now going to segue from the Keating side bar, which I had to do, back to Rogallach. Keating tells us–and now you know what I might think about this particular story– Keating tells us that Rogallach was just awful. He killed a nephew to ensure his succession. He had incestuous relations with his daughter. He wouldn’t obey St Feichin. Finally, he got murdered by a couple of servants whom he found cutting up a deer that he had wounded, but they had actually killed. Rather than handing the animal back, as Rogallach demanded, they killed him. There’s also a detail that he was on a white horse, I’ll just give you that too. Like Niall of the Nine Hostages throwing his bloody hand onto Ulster, this is a great story. However, if Keating had been sticking to history, historical evidence, rather than literature and tradition, he might have seen that in the Annals of Tigernach we are told that Rogallach was killed by Máel Brigte mac Mothlachán who came from the Corco Cullu tribe because Rogallach was invading their territory. That’s it, and frankly, it sounds a lot more likely. So there you are. But what happened after that? Rogallach’s son, Cathal, avenged his death, and the tribes would continue to contend for power in the region. Loingsech mac Colmáin became king. His descendants fought with the O’Rourke, who were cousins–his cousins, of course–but the Ó Conchobair ruled for hundreds of years, and it would be Rory Ó Conchobair who exiled Dermot Mac Murchada, giving him an excuse to invite the Normans in. Then there would be more battles, and there’d be battles with the invaders. This would continue through the Irish rebellion of 1798. Connacht was, in the middle of the 19th century, the hardest hit county in the Irish famine, and it’s still, however, the main stronghold of the Gaeltach, the Galway Gaeltacht being the largest Irish-speaking area in Ireland. So you can go there, and you can visit the Aran islands. You can visit Yates’ grave. You can visit the house where Constance Markievicz lived. You can visit the cliffs of Moher. Connaught was great, and it’s been divided up into four counties. Rogallach died, but I doubt that there was a white horse and any deer hunting involved. The end, by me, Oh, Michelle, what did you find?

Michelle Butler  15:21 

I was really interested in this story, but I hoped for a different scholarly ending to my quest. I was really interested in this because it goes from being in the sources, such as we have–the various annals, the fragmentary annals, all of which I have looked at, I will tell you why in a minute–to, a thousand years later, this story in Geoffrey Keating, which is more or less casting him as a figure of Greek mythology. That whole thing with the daughter is a retread of the Oedipus story. They get told by their druid that the child that the wife is pregnant with at that moment is going to be their downfall. Once the baby’s born, they immediately send the baby away with orders to kill it. But of course, they can’t possibly do that. So it gets taken and left in a bag hanging on a door for a nun to raise. The nun raises the baby, and she grows up to be lovely and virtuous. Of course, the evil king’s like, send that one to my bed, so he sleeps with her without knowing who she is. But, you know, he’s a jerk, right–

Anne Brannen  16:44 

He’s a jerk, yeah.

Michelle Butler  16:46 

The story becomes such unrelenting villainy that what I really wanted to know was where that happened.

Anne Brannen  16:55 

Good question, a very good question.

Michelle Butler  16:58 

Because as Keating tells it, it’s not really, he’s not really asking questions about whether things are true. He’s just throwing everything in there. He’s really kind of upfront about that. ‘Well, there wasn’t much in the annals, so I’m gonna go look over here in the poetry, and I’m gonna pull this in, and I’m gonna pull that in. It’s gonna make for a great yarn. This is fabulous.’

Anne Brannen  17:20 

It’s also giving this valence to all the voices, all the Irish voices that he can find, in a time when Irish voices are, in the big scheme of things, not really being listened to at all. So I get that. I get that. But it’s not a history. It’s a collection of stories.

Michelle Butler  17:38 

Yeah, yeah, exactly. His book–Bernadette Cunningham has a book about him, which I thought was really interesting. Let me read you just the first little bit of it. She starts her book this way. “The real Geoffrey Keating is more elusive than Shakespeare. No manuscript in his hand has been identified, and none of his contemporaries mentions having met him. The most tangible links to the real person are a chalice bearing his name, now in Waterford Museum, and a plaque erected in his memory by persons unknown in 1644, still visible in its original location over the entrance door to Cillín Chiaráin in Tubbrid County, Tipperary. Most of the folklore about him cannot be traced back to the 17th century, but is primarily drawn from later published sources, the accuracy of which cannot be tested. Although the historical Keating is no longer familiar, his writings have had an influence on Irish language and literature as significant as Shakespeare’s role in relation to Englis.” Later on, she talks about how he gets claimed by the 19th century Irish nationalism movement as sort of the fountainhead of Irish literature, and so you have a good half century, if not longer, of people who are taught Irish by having them copy Keating. He’s humongously, humongously important. Also there’s this kind of piece of him being a more or less Irish nationalism resistance fighter. The book was written in 1634 in Irish, right? So he makes this choice to write in contemporary Irish, which is a big hairy deal in the early 17th century, because you’ve just gone through the 16th century of the Tudors taking it into their heads that they were absolutely, no shit going to bring Ireland to heel. We are in the time period of Edmund Spencer’s ‘A view of the Present State of Ireland, where he has a plantation, he gets burned out of it, and then he writes the treatise in which he says, ‘These people are animals. The only solution is to kill them all and repopulate Ireland with good English people.’

Anne Brannen  20:01 

It’s really such a different work than ‘The Faery Queen,’ isn’t it?

Michelle Butler  20:05 

It super duper is. I think it’s really important for everybody to who loves ‘The Faery Queen’ to know that the other side of this is him advocating genocide.

Anne Brannen  20:14 

Yeah, good to know.

Michelle Butler  20:16 

It just needs to be there. But because of the time period in which we’re at, this book is not published in Irish until the late 19th century–250 years later. It’s translated into English. It’s translated into Latin. And those were allowed by the English government to be published, but not in Irish. So it’s real interesting that the Irish manuscript tradition is maintained with this book for hundreds of years. It’s copied and it circulates in manuscript. But it’s also interesting that Keating kind of becomes his subject. He’s repeating all of these little gossipy, rumory, mythy things, and then he becomes one. He becomes a locus of folklore.

Anne Brannen  21:03 

Uh huh.

Michelle Butler  21:04 

There’s all these stories about where he comes from and what his family was, and how he went off over here to hang out and write. There’s no evidence for any of that.

Anne Brannen  21:17 

Whoa.

Michelle Butler  21:18 

He becomes a figure of folklore, all of which is really interesting, but it does not answer my question. I found Keating to be a very fascinating, very worthwhile rabbit hole, but it does not answer my question.  How did this king–standard, standard, early Irish murder–

Anne Brannen  21:47 

Yeah, there’s so many of them, and they’re all much alike, really.

Michelle Butler  21:50 

Absolutely standard. Murdered by a rival. Fabulous, we’ll chalk it up with the other 570 that happened that decade. There’s really a ton of these. So I went on a quest. It was an unsuccessful quest, but I spent quite a lot of time on it.

Anne Brannen  22:13 

And you’ve been busy too. It wasn’t like you had a whole lot of time for this.

Michelle Butler  22:18 

So, so frustrating. Peter Walsh has a article from 1939 called ‘The Christian kings of Connacht.’ He lists all of the sources–the contemporary, early medieval sources, that this death is known from, and what they say about it. Awesome. How very useful. Just for funsies, I went and looked at them myself. They say what he says they say. It was very hard to find this article because the book that I’m coming to in a second misquoted the title.

Anne Brannen  22:55 

There was some reason we wanted to become scholars. What was it? It was in the long ago.

Michelle Butler  23:05 

It took a ridiculous amount of time for me to find this article because it is not given the right title in the book that I’m coming to, which is FJ Byrne’s Irish Kings and High Kings from 1973. I had a lot of high hopes of this being useful. From there, I found Peter Walsh’s article. I looked at the Book of Invasions. I looked at the Ulster Annals, the Book of Ballymote, the Tigernach Annals, the fragmentary annals, the Chronicle Scottorum, and an anonymous poem from the 12th century on the kings of Connacht. Here is my annoyance. I have several annoyances with FJ Byrne, but one of them is that he claims that Rogallach is important. He calls him the true founder of the Ui Brien fortunes. He gives me two pages about Rogallach, and here’s how it starts. “Although the death of Uatu mac Áedo is recorded in–” that’s Rogallach’s father” –in 601 or 602, the annals of Ulster do not call him king of Connacht. The first member of the Ui Brien whom we may reasonably accept as King of Connacht, in some sense, is his son. Guiare–” who I’m going to come to in a second” –contemporary Rogallach mac Uatach, who died in 649. The regnal lists say that he slew his predecessor, Guaire’s father, Colman mac Cobthaig, at the Battle of Cennbag.”  Okay, here’s where I want to take Byrne and shake him hard. Quote, “a late epitome of king tales recast into pseudoannalistic form represents him in a sinister light.” And then he goes on to retell the story as it is in Keating. What in the actual hell is he talking about? Is there a source given for this? Why, no, I’m glad you asked. There isn’t. Is this Keating? I don’t know. I’m assuming not, because if it was Keating, he would just say Keating, hopefully, but he just throws this out here. I’m so mad. I’m so mad. I have spent hours looking for this.

Anne Brannen  23:05 

And he tells you nothing about where he got it.

Michelle Butler  25:25 

He just throws it out there.

Anne Brannen  25:38 

There’s a thing, and I don’t know its name.

Michelle Butler  25:43 

I was telling you before we started recording that this is exactly like my geometry teacher, who used to say, ‘as any fool can see.’ He just throws this out here like everybody’s gonna know. It’s totally common knowledge what the fuck I’m talking about. What is it? What is it? What is it? I went to his endnotes, such as they were, about this chapter, and I looked at every single source that he cites that is supposedly where he got the information for this chapter. None of them are this. None of them even refer to this. This is as much a vaporware, as far as I can tell, as Keating, because Keating says he cites a bunch of stuff. Keating says, ‘oh, yeah, I totally went and looked at the Psalter of Tara.’ Nobody has a clue whether that existed. He says he went and looked at it. And it’s possible it did exist. Stuff has been lost. Stuff has been lost. It may be sitting around in somebody’s attic, for all we know, but nobody knows where it is now or if it actually really existed. But this is just as bad. This is worse because it’s 1973 and when I went to graduate school, what I was told is that the first rule of scholarship is reproducibility. What you must do in scholarship is, anybody who reads your work has to be able to find your sources. If you say something says something, they have to be able to go find that thing. And it has to be a precise enough source that they can actually find it. You can’t just say, ‘Hey, I’m citing this little detailed thing. Here is the entire 500 page book it’s in.’ No, no. You have to give a page number or chapter and verse, if it’s something like a play where you don’t have pagination. This is unconscionable. And I am so annoyed. I’m so annoyed. He tells me he’s important, and then he cannot be bothered to tell me this source for where he becomes an asshole. The king, I mean. This is really important. He’s the first recognized High King of Connacht. He becomes portrayed as a total villain in this thing over here that I’m not going to bother to give you the name of. That feels important to me. Then on the very next page, we turn the page, and he’s talking about their grandchild, whose name I’m so not going to try to pronounce, because the important part is here quote “his great grandmother, Muirend is mentioned in an archaic praise poem to Indrechtach” okay, I did try to say it, “– parenthesis in The Saga of Rogallach, she bears some characteristic marks of a mythological figure,” and now he quotes some Irish and doesn’t translate it, nor does he tell me where this comes from. What is the Saga of Rogallach? Is that a thing?

Anne Brannen  28:37 

Or is it just like the story that we tell? Maybe that’s what it means.

Michelle Butler  28:42 

Yes. Is this a thing, or is this just him referring to another retelling of it from somewhere else. I super duper thought I was going to be able to find how this guy went from a standard issue murdered king, which is interesting on its own, to being this horrible example of a villain, because I thought that was interesting, right.

Anne Brannen  29:10 

Right.

Michelle Butler  29:10 

What happens here? How does this happen? We know why this happens with Macbeth. We kind of know why he goes from being the standard issue king to being the villain of the piece. We don’t know this with him. And I’m very frustrated. I’m very, very frustrated. The only, and this is an absolute guess, the only guess I have, is that there’s rivalry between two branches of the Ui Brien family, and he is on one and Guaire is a rival on another branch of the Ui Brien family, and Rogallach killed his father in battle. Guaire becomes a figure of legend himself, but his legends are, by and large, positive. They’re really, really close to hagiography. My only guess, which I’m more or less pulling out of the air, is that if one becomes good, the other one has to become bad, so you have this clear rivalry. But there’s nothing–I mean, I’m literally guessing. I have no evidence for that whatsoever, because if the scholarship on this exists, if it exists, I cannot find it, and nobody is bothering to tell me where it is in their sources. But apparently, Byrne took this secret to his grave in 2017. I actually was going to email him if I could find him. If he had still been alive, I was going to email him to ask him, ‘hey buddy, would you mind just throwing me a bone here? What were you talking about?’ ‘Well, I always told all my kids in class.’ ‘Great, fabulous. How about writing it down?’ So today’s story is a story of the limitations both of sources and of scholarship, II think. I am unspeakably annoyed that I cannot narrow down where he becomes this villain and why. We just know that by the time of the 17th century, he is being presented as a thoroughly bad dude. I don’t understand it, because Keating is interested in the most positive portrayal possible of Irish history. So why is he repeating this story? Is he making it up? So it’s not so much that there’s a mystery about who killed him. We know that basically what’s going on is he’s getting murdered by a rival king whose territory he strayed into, fine, fine, and probably some of his people who were with him, which is where the peasant part comes from. But why he becomes this Darth Vader figure is totally imperceptible, even if Byrne knew it.

Anne Brannen  32:06 

And when does the whole stuff with the deer and the white horse, when does that get added in?

Michelle Butler  32:11 

One of the annals does mention the white horse. Not the not the deer, but one of them does mention the white horse.

Anne Brannen  32:19 

Is it in a story where he’s getting killed by servants, or is he being killed by the rival?

Michelle Butler  32:23 

He’s being killed by the rival, but he’s on a white horse.

Anne Brannen  32:27 

Oh god. I think Keating kind of amalgamates everything he’s got.

Michelle Butler  32:34 

One of the things that cracks me up about Keating is he’s kind of like the book of Genesis. He tells two versions of this. Another thing that this topic underscores is that Wikipedia is a good place to start, but a bad place to end. Wikipedia claims that Keating tells us the whole big Greek tragedy version of Rogallach’s life, and that if you go back and look at the chronicles, you get this whole other really, really more mundane version, where he’s just killed by a rival. Keating has both.

Anne Brannen  33:08 

Oh, he does, does he.

Michelle Butler  33:09 

It is a misrepresentation of Keating to claim that he only has the one. But it’s like the book of Genesis, where you get two creation stories. Keating first tells the one from the chronicles. Then he’s like, ‘but let me tell you this other one too.’ So literally what he says here is “In Connell’s reign, also, Rogallach, son of Uata, who was 25 years king of Connacht, was killed by Máel Brigte son of Mothlachánmal and his slaves. That’s totally true, from the chronicles.

Anne Brannen  33:33 

And the kind of thing that might actually happen.

Michelle Butler  33:39 

Yep, absolutely consistent with the chronicles. Then he pivots, with no acknowledgement whatsoever that he has moved from the realm of history to the realm of either legend or speculation or something, because now he pivots to “this Rogallach entertained the most violent hatred and envy toward the son of his elder brother, lest he might attack him and deprive him of the kingdom of Connacht.” Then he goes into the whole story about this sneaky way of killing the nephew, where he pretended that he was sick. ‘You gotta come visit me. I’m sick.’ The nephew is skeptical, so he shows up with guards. *cough cough* ‘I can’t believe you don’t trust me. You need to come back tomorrow. I’m about to die.’ The nephew is like, ‘man, he’s really sick.’ So he comes back the next day without his bodyguards, and Rogallach has his men there, and he kills him. Back to the quote. “Rogallach then immediately got up from his sick bed and commenced to feast, joyfully and free from care.”

Anne Brannen  34:52 

Oh, it’s a blood feast.

Michelle Butler  34:56 

It’s a blood feast. This story is chock full of every possible slander. All of the tropes are here. Then he goes into this version where it’s more or less the Oedipus story. Rogallach and his wife get told by her druid that the child she’s carrying is going to bring about their deaths, and so as soon as the baby’s born, they send the baby away with instructions to kill the baby. But the herdsman, when he saw the infant’s face, his heart softened towards it. I mean, I’m kind of glad to know that random people that you hand a baby to and say, ‘go out and kill the baby,’ kind of go, ‘Sure, fine’ and then once they get out the door, they’re like, ‘God, that was crazy. I’m just gonna take this kid over here. Like, that’s nuts. Who wants to kill an infant?’ So he takes the baby to a religious woman, and baby is raised, and then, you know, grows up, and Rogallach sees her and is like, ‘she’s hot, save her sent to me.’ So now we’re in the realm of Oedipus Rex, with this little twist on it. But Keating doesn’t once say, ‘I have skepticism about this story.’ He just goes into the deer thing, where Rogallach is hunting, and he throws a spear at it, and then it escapes. He comes across the servants and demands that they give him the deer back, and they say, ‘I don’t think so’ and they kill him. “They fall upon him with their spades and other implements. So he was slain by their hands and thus fulfilled the prophecy of the saints.” Oh, that was earlier on in the story. A couple of saints come to him and tell him, ‘we have heard not great things. You need to shape up.’ There’s no recognition whatsoever that given this…there isn’t plot consistency, is what I’m going to say.

Anne Brannen  36:50 

Yeah, there’s two different ways to die, and they are presented as equal things without any kind of signaling that we understand that these are two different ways to die. It’s just that he dies in these two different ways. You would really think that this isn’t one of the real people, but he actually is, oddly enough. You know what this reminds me of, though, listening to stuff with Keating. It reminds me of how often I’m talking to people about something that happened in the Middle Ages, and they say, ‘Well, you know, we don’t really know what happened.’ And I say, ‘Well, actually, in this case, we do know this, and we do know that’ and what people will say is, ‘yeah, but there’s so many different versions that we don’t know what’s true and what’s going on.’ I mean, sometimes there are. We don’t know what’s true. But as we know from our, what, three, four years of working on the podcast–and actually we knew before, we’re just repeating it–what’s going on is that there’s an acceptance of all sources as being equal. There’s no distinction between any kind of the sources. They’re all doing the same thing instead of looking at, well, what is this? Who’s writing it? What is the audience? What is this for? Which is how we now figure out it’s like all the things that come to Keating are equally valid. Not only is there no reason to question them, if you do question them, then you have to get into ‘well, how do you know which is right?’ Well, we know which is right because, first of all, we know the difference between stories and chronicles, but also the fact that one makes sense and one doesn’t, and also the fact that we understand the one story to have been cobbled together from a whole bunch of sources, the tropes that have come down through the ages, and the other one is just kind of like there was a guy and his rival didn’t like him and he killed him.

Michelle Butler  38:28 

That is exactly what I thought I was going to find, that 300 years later, the rival branch of the Ui Brien family is responsible for sponsoring this poem. And wouldn’t you know it, Rogallach who was the head of the other branch, turns out to be a total villain in their telling. That would make total sense.

Anne Brannen  38:48 

And maybe it happened, but we don’t know. If anybody did know, they don’t say. You know what else? There’s another way that this kind of thing happens. I’m thinking about ballads and the ways in which we find these different versions, and how sometimes, things just get added on or taken off or changed around. It’s not anything to do with what either the original story was or what the original history was. It all has to do with the narrative structure and what is satisfying. That can have happened too. One of the one of the sources that Keating uses is not written down. He’s using tradition.

Michelle Butler  39:23 

Yes, that is possible. He was university educated. He had to go to the continent to be university educated because you weren’t allowed as a Catholic to be admitted to the universities in Ireland at this time. There was a university in Bordeaux that had just been started not terribly long before, called The Irish University, but yeah, he’s kind of got a foot in both camps. He’s a parish priest. He’s listening to people. I hope this is true, because it’s kind of entertaining. One of the things that he’s supposed to have done in his parish was to get rid of the practice of waiting for the local lords to show up before starting mass. ‘Either show up on time, or just slink in because I’m not waiting for you.’

Anne Brannen  40:04 

If you’re an absentee landlord, you’re not showing up till next year. So for sure, it’s good to stop that tradition.

Michelle Butler  40:09 

But again, who knows? Right? Who knows? It makes a certain amount of sense to me that if, as he becomes the figure that is seen as this headwaters of Irish literature and language, that stories like that would attach themselves to him like barnacles, because you want him to have been a good person. You want him to have been somebody who passive aggressively told the lords where to get off, but he’s– I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m so sorry. The moral of this episode is the problematic nature of sources, and that just because something is old doesn’t mean it’s true. Keating is old from our point of view, but he’s 1000 years after Rogallach’s death. He doesn’t know any more than we do. Probably. It’s possible there’s a couple of sources that have been lost since then, but probably not. People aren’t willy nilly recycling medieval manuscripts by the 17th century. Now, 300 years before that, absolutely, but by the 17th century, we’re well into the antiquarian phase of things.

Anne Brannen  41:18 

Yeah, some people are trying to save stuff.

Michelle Butler  41:26 

You do have a lot of loss happening over the course of the Reformation and but you also have the antiquarians realizing that there’s a disaster happening, and they’re trying to snap things up and hold on to them.

Anne Brannen  41:37 

And then give them to the British Library. It’s very nice.

Michelle Butler  41:41 

So it is so much less probable that a source that he cites has gone missing than back with Geoffrey of Monmouth, who’s saying, in the 12th century, ‘there is a source that I cited,’ and none of us can find hide nor hair of it. That’s possible. It’s also possible he’s a liar, and he’s just trying to, in the newly literate 12th century where everybody’s like, I can read and write, look at me.

Anne Brannen  42:09 

You have to say who your auctoritas is.

Michelle Butler  42:11 

Yes. So it’s entirely possible he’s just making that up. But Keating, if he had sources, they more than likely still exist, and other people would have cited them and copied them.

Anne Brannen  42:21 

I’m thinking about all the annals and the chronicles too, and the things we’ve got that tell us all these bits of history, where you’ve got one line where such and such happened, and how you get so interested in these stories. If you were going to do something with them, like, I don’t know, publish a book or make a movie, you’ve really got to add all this stuff. You’ve got to flesh it out. I mean, I understand the fleshing it out, but still, it’s not history.

Michelle Butler  42:47 

Keatings’ retelling of this is wild. He has the one sentence, this is what actually happened–literally, one sentence from the chronicles, and then he just pivots to the page and a half of, here’s the villain story, and he–I don’t need to say this, but maybe I do–he also cites no source for this.

Anne Brannen  43:09 

Yeah, he doesn’t cite sources. He’s not into this source citing thing.

Michelle Butler  43:13 

He gives us a list at the beginning of what he’s working from. But he doesn’t cite individually like this came from that. He just says, here’s the books I read.

Anne Brannen  43:21 

Yeah, and they can’t be all the sources, we know that.

Michelle Butler  43:24 

Of course not. Yeah, no. And Cunningham has a list–I’m telling you, it’s been a week, man–Cunningham has a whole entire chapter in her book where she goes through what we know about his sources. I went through as many of them as I could. Clearly, hopefully, one of them is the thing that Byrne is talking about. But if so, it wasn’t something I could easily locate. I looked at as many of these as I could.

Anne Brannen  43:51 

We’ll put her work in the in the show notes. You going to put that list that she’s got too, just in case somebody wants to…

Michelle Butler  43:58 

The chapter is “Scholarly networks and approaches to the historical record.” So that’s where they go through and talk about, we know for sure he looked at the Laud miscellaneous manuscript, and we know for sure he looked at the Psalter of Cashel, and we know for sure he looked at the Book of Invasions, and we know for sure he looked at the List of the Kings, but none of the ones that I found have anything like what is in him. So I don’t know what to make of it. I literally have no idea whether Keating made this up out of his head, or whether he has a source that Byrne knows about, but I can’t find. I don’t know what Keating’s reason would be for making this up, but it’s an unanswerable question, which annoys me a lot. I am so sorry. Hopefully we’re doing something next that has actual answers, as opposed to being a sober warning about the nature of scholarship and citing your damn sources.

Anne Brannen  45:03 

Well, theoretically, this was a podcast about the murder of Rogallach, but in reality, the crime was bad scholarship.

Michelle Butler  45:12 

There you go. For real. Bad scholarship.

Anne Brannen  45:16 

There will be sources next time, because what we’re going to do, we want to talk about bees in the Middle Ages.

Michelle Butler  45:21 

Oooo, it’s time for the bee crime.

Anne Brannen  45:25 

It’s the bee crime. We found a bee crime. So we can, like, focus on that, but really, we want to talk about bees in the Middle Ages. Because bees are awesome, and there’s going to be more stuff than there was on saffron, honey. There’s gonna be enough in, like, language that you can read, and so all will be well.

Michelle Butler  45:42 

I’m so excited about the bee crimes.

Anne Brannen  45:45 

The bees. It’ll be a breath of fresh air after the quagmire.

Michelle Butler  45:48 

Medieval people have no chill about the idea of stealing their bees and all bee-related products. They’re very serious about this.

Anne Brannen  45:55 

They’re very serious. Bees. Bees are pretty important, yeah. And they’re dealt with so differently. I mean, well, we’ll talk about bees.

Michelle Butler  46:02 

We’ve been waiting for months to do the bees.

Anne Brannen  46:05 

Yeah, we have. We keep having to do other stuff. So, yeah, looking forward to that. But actually, I enjoyed this. I mean, my part of it wasn’t hard. I was doing history in context. And the fact that I don’t like John Hart and, you know, was annoyed at Geoffrey Keating and but anyway, that was all I had to do. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology.

Michelle Butler  42:22 

And how much technology does it take, really, to provide a footnote?

Michelle Butler  42:22 

We can be found on Spotify and Apple podcasts and all the places where the podcasts are hanging out. If you go to truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word, you can find us. There’ll be links to the podcast, and there’ll be the show notes and transcriptions when we get them in, and lovely little blurbs I write and whatnot, and yeah, so you can find us there. You can leave comments. You can get a hold of us and we like all that. I don’t think I say anything else, do I? Was that all the information? I think it was.

Michelle Butler  42:22 

I think so. I think so.

Anne Brannen  42:22 

Bye

Michelle Butler  42:22 

Bye.

115. The Janissaries Briefly Break the Truce, December 24, 1522, Rhodes

Anne Brannen  0:24 

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:33 

And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:37 

We’re talking today about a subject that we really enjoyed because we didn’t know a lot about it. So we got to learn a lot of things. We’re talking about the Siege of Rhodes. The crime today is that after the Siege of Rhodes, the Janissaries were very badly behaved. So we’ll get to that. But first, context. This was in 1522. The Knights Hospitallers had started out of Benedictine monks who ran the hospitals, one for men and one for women, in Jerusalem. They’d started in the 11th century, and they were for the pilgrims who came to Jerusalem from Europe, the Christian pilgrims who were coming to Jerusalem. So they were taking care of that. They were in charge of all that. The Benedictines are about charity and taking care of people. But the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem existed from 1098, when the Crusades took Edessa to 1291, when the Kingdom of Jerusalem was taken by the Mamluk Sultanate. Jerusalem itself had already fallen to Saladin’s Army in 1187, and so the Benedictine hospitals had been serving the Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem. But after the Crusaders took Jerusalem, the Hospitallers became more important. They weren’t taking care of just pilgrims. But there were, of course, you know, crusaders that needed things, obviously. In the early 12th century–this is about 25 years after the conquest of Jerusalem, the Christian conquest of Jerusalem–the order began to take in Crusader knights, who then became Hospitallers, which would make more sense, really, than monks becoming knights. The Knights Templar had been founded in 1120. The Hospitallers were starting to be militarized right after that. So the Hospitallers were at the hospital in Jerusalem, which recently, by the way, got partially excavated. It was apparently the biggest hospital at that time, and you can see some of the arches. It was in 2013 they started excavating it in Jerusalem. At any rate, so the Hospitallers were there in Jerusalem, and it was their job to heal the sick and the wounded and defend the Holy Land. Because some of them had been knights. Doesn’t this only make sense. It wasn’t like the Benedictines before that had been defending the Holy Land. No, they weren’t. They were just taking care of pilgrims, but now there were knights who had become healers, and so they were still knights, and they also defended the holy land. And over time, they had lots of castles. Some were given to them, some they built. They governed a lot of towns, and because they were not just healing people, but also being, you know, defenders of the holy Crusader kingdom, they fought in battles. They were the second most important and the second largest military order in the Crusades, after the Templars. But unlike the Templars, they were, besides being religious, fighters and medics. I just love this. They were medics. I like to think about this. There’s this little order like, ‘whack, whack, whack, whack. I can fix that for you.’ This is a very dual sort of thing, the medic fighters. That’s just amazing, I think, by the way, Michelle, I wanted to mention Cadfael, because he was a Crusader and he was a healer and he was a Benedictine monk, but he was not a Hospitaller. So I just wanted to make that clear. In case you were not clear about that.

Michelle Butler  4:03 

That’s right, that’s right. Yeah, I hadn’t put that together. But yes.

Anne Brannen  4:10 

I find that interesting, really. It gives him a really different narrative arc than it would if he was a knight that became a healer and then he decided to leave the order and go to England. It gives them a different arc. Any rate, that all went on for a while, and the Crusader kingdom was around for about 200 years. God help us. The Hospitallers fought, and they healed the wounded, and they got richer and richer, and the construct of the Crusader Kingdom changed according to whether the Christians or the Muslims had won the last battle. But finally, as mentioned before, the Crusaders lost the city of Jerusalem, and then they lost the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and then there wasn’t any more Crusader kingdom. But there were lots of crusaders, weren’t there, and so they had to go someplace. The crusaders and their families who weren’t dead because of the battles, they had to go someplace. Some of them were enslaved. Some of them got away, going to the kingdom of Cyprus, and this included the Knights Hospitallers, who decided, after finding the clashing politics of the survivors too annoying, to leave Cyprus and found their own kingdom, and the Greek island of Rhodes seemed like a really good place to light, so they went there. There were, not surprisingly, already people living on Rhodes. It had been captured–history of Rhodes is where we’re going now–it had been captured by the Islamic Umayyads in 654 and then by the Arabs in 673, and by the Byzantines in 715. In 1090, the Seljuk Turks captured it. And then Alexius Comenus the first took it. A few years later–that was at the First Crusade, because at that time, the Byzantine Empire was fighting along the western Crusaders. How long do we think that lasts? Well, by the beginning of the 14th century, that’s about 1310, the year the Knights Hospitallers decided to live in Rhodes, relations between the Eastern and Western pieces of the Christian church have gotten worse and worse and worse and worse and worse, and Rhodes territory was contested between Venetian forces and Byzantine, and Byzantine territories were considered, you know, rightful targets by the Latin Christian Crusaders, because they didn’t even really count as Christian anymore. So. So there you are. So the Hospitallers first made a deal with one of the Italian leaders whereby they got some of Rhodes and he kept some stuff, and he added his ships to the Hospitaller ships, and they invaded the island in 1307. They took some castles, and they massacred some Turks, and they encouraged the Greeks to commit treason. It took a while to take the city of Rhodes itself. Finally, in 1310, they captured the city and its navy. There were some more battles since not everybody was all happy with this outcome, but by 1320 they controlled the territory. Okay, so there they were in Rhodes, and they were the boss. They got more rich and they got more militarized on account of continuing to have to fight off Muslim attacks. The Sultan of Egypt attacked in 1444 and the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror attacked in 1480 in the first siege of Rhodes. By the way, if you were to go and look up on Google, the siege of Rhodes, you’ll get the second siege of Rhodes. You have to really tell them which one you want. They attacked and were defeated at great cost of life, both sides, and then they did enter the city. We’re told that the Grand Master of the Hospitallers directed his forces after being heavily wounded, he kept his lance. Any rate, the Hospitallers beat back the Turks. At least 3000 of the Turks were killed just on that day alone, and within a couple of weeks, the Ottomans left. So much for that. Okay, then there was an earthquake. So the siege and the earthquake convinced the Hospitallers that they really had to strengthen the fortifications, and so they made the walls thicker of the fortress castle. They widened the dry ditch. They made bulwarks around the towers. They made bulwarks, which are protrusions in the wall so that you could fight in three directions rather than just one. They built a bunch of bastions–those project further from the walls and are highly fortified. More on them later, because that’s what the Turks are going to be meeting. They modernized the parapets, which had been very good for archery defense, but not so great against gunpowder. As time went on, cannons were being used in sieges, and they changed siege warfare completely. I’m not going more into that, because I believe that was Michelle’s rabbit hole. Am I not correct?

Michelle Butler  9:06 

One of them. I think I have more notes for this episode than possibly any other episode.

Anne Brannen  9:12 

And it’s all about guns. Now, then. The siege of 1522–you go looking for the siege, that’s the one they give you, because the first one sort of pales in comparison at many levels–was not a surprise. The Grand Master had called on the Hospitallers of Europe to come to the aid of Rhodes in 1521, fully expecting the Ottomans to show up again. The Hospitallers had been interrupting Ottoman shipping. They were Christians and not Muslim, and their presence was therefore insulting. And Suleiman the Magnificent, had been expanding the Ottoman Empire, and Rhodes was in the way. So it was just a matter of time. Anyway, they asked for help from the Hospitallers of Europe, and one person came from Ireland. So as the Grand Master had expected, the Turks, with 400 ships, arrived in June of 1522. Ah, our main story. We go into our main story. They blockaded the harbor. They had advanced artillery. They had really advanced artillery, including the vital large cannons. And they bombarded the walls. They also mined tunnels underneath the walls and used gunpowder explosions. The first major breach was done with large mines which were set in a tunnel under one of the bastions. A big section of the wall fell into the moat. Gunpowder is really, really effective against fortifications that were built before it started getting used a lot. Okay, that’s not surprising, really. The Turks nearly got through the hole in the wall at that point three times that day, but they were fought back. The Turks continued to fire the cannons against the walls, but the near success of that gunpowder mine on one of the bastions inspired them to regularly attack all the others. So they were having mines under the bastions, and they were doing it so quickly that there’s some speculation that there were still tunnels built by the Romans that were in the area. By November–so that’s some months after the beginning of the siege–both sides were demoralized and exhausted, and they wanted the whole damn thing over. Suleiman, at that point, offered to let everybody in the town live and give them food as well–he was going to feed them. It’s really nice–if they would surrender. He said if the Turks had to take the city by force, he was just going to kill or enslave everybody, but if they would surrender, he would be very good to them. So there was a truce, supposedly for negotiations. But the townspeople did not trust Suleiman, and so they wanted assurances. Like, what the hell that would be? I do not know. We’ll tell you twice. I mean, what is an assurance? It pissed off Suleiman. I am not surprised. So he started all the cannoning and the gunpowdering again, and by the end of December, the walls were pretty much destroyed–not entirely, but pretty much. And the Hospitallers asked for a truce. Suleiman gave them a truce and a sort of shockingly generous set of terms. Here’s the terms. The Greek and Latin townspeople and the Hospitallers had 12 days to get off the island. They were allowed to keep their weapons, their valuables, their religious items and their icons, and the Christian churches, western or eastern, were going to be left alone, neither harmed nor turned into mosques. The people on the island who were staying–the regular people, not the knights, but the regular people–had three years wherein they could leave at any time, no questions asked. They could stay if they wanted, and they would not be forced to be Muslim, and they would not be subject to the Ottoman taxes for five years. Also, no children were going to be taken from parents. These are astonishingly good terms to me. Are you kidding? Michelle, have you ever heard of terms like that?

Anne Brannen  9:12 

Particularly since he had just taken Belgrade–Suleiman the magnificent had at Belgrade only months earlier, razed the city, massacred the garrison and killed or enslaved the entire populace. And he threatened that to them–‘surrender, or I’m going to kill you, even down to the cats.’ Which is a nice touch.

Anne Brannen  11:07 

Down to the cats. It’s very good, but they didn’t surrender.

Michelle Butler  11:07 

Belgrade, I don’t think surrendered. I didn’t read a whole lot about Belgrade, but yeah, he threatened Rhodes that he’d slaughter them down to the cats.

Anne Brannen  11:07 

I did not know about the cats. I am glad that they surrendered and therefore saved the cats of Rhodes.

Michelle Butler  11:07 

One of the tourism videos I looked at actually ends with the guy following stray cats around on Rhodes.

Anne Brannen  11:07 

So people did know that he would follow through if they did not surrender. Fair enough. I came across an explanation for him that makes sense to me. It’s that the Hospitallers and the townspeople had fought valiantly and were deserving of honor, besides the fact that they surrendered, and treating them the way that Suleiman brings honor to Suleiman as well. It’s a good system, really, I think so. The Hospitallers left in glorious array. They were given 50 ships. I forgot to tell you that that was one of the things, that if they needed ships, they were going to give them ships. The Turks gave them ships. And they went from the town to the harbor decked out in their battle gear. They had drums and banners. The surviving towns people who wanted to leave with them went with them–behind, I think, and not in battle gear. I don’t know if they had banners. It was just glorious and very, very honorable. It was great. And Suleiman said of the Grand Master–and this is a quote: “It is not without regret that I forced this brave man from his house in his old age.” They went to Sicily, because that’s where people were going. But I want to have a little footnote here. True Crime Medieval is centered on true crimes, obviously, and our method of working is that we have this shared list of medieval crimes and when either one of us thinks of some crime or we come across one that we think is interesting, we put it on the list. And sometimes what is on the list isn’t really a crime, but something we want to talk about, like the sinking of the White Ship, or bees in the Middle Ages. And so we have to find the crimes so that when I write this whole thing up, I need a title and a blurb for the podcast, I have a crime to focus on. And you might have noticed that no crime in the siege of Rhodes has been mentioned yet. This is because I couldn’t find one, and I looked all over. There’s no treachery, there’s no massacres. It was a deadly and bloody siege, but the rules of war, as far as I can tell, are obeyed. God damn. And the siege itself seems not actually very criminal. The island had been going back and forth among various owners for millennia, and the Hospitallers were really at the end of their middle eastern sojourner. It was time to go. But I did it. I found a crime. It didn’t take place in the siege itself. No, no, it was afterward. Edward Creasy, writing in 1906, tells us that after enumerating the generous terms of the wonderful truce that, “The insubordinate violence of the Janissaries caused some infraction of these terms, but the main provisions of the treaty were fairly carried into effect.” So there were some people that were bad, but everything pretty much worked out. Ta da, ta da, ta da. There you have it. The Janissaries misbehaved–our crime–when not occupied by fighting. Here’s the problem. The Janissaries would get bored and restless and start pillaging. And in this case, a troop of Janissaries were left stationed in the town after the treaty, before the knights and the civilians were supposed to leave. They ransacked and pillaged houses, and they desecrated churches, and they threw sick people out of their beds in the hospital, and they raped women and maidens over at the Church of St John. In other words, they acted just as if they were at war and had conquered a city. They weren’t supposed to do that, but apparently it was sort of a short interlude and not part of the general scheme of things, and I imagine they got in trouble. But at this point, some of you might be asking, Who the hell are the Janissaries? And God knows if I’m saying that right. The Janissaries were– the word comes from Janissary, which means new soldiers. The Janissaries were the Ottoman Sultan’s, elite household troops. In the beginning, they were captured Christian boys, mostly from the Slavic countries, who were circumcised and converted to Islam and taken into the Army as a unit, and caused to live under strict orders and discipline. They had salaries, which other slaves did not, and they had absolute loyalty to the Ottoman Sultan, except, as we see, if they got bored. They were renowned in Europe as a very, very elite and scary fighting force, and they had been in the siege of Rhodes. They’d been there. The thing is, you can have all the cannons you want–later, when you get into having aircraft, you can all have all the missiles you want and whatnot, but you can’t actually take a city or territory without foot soldiers. You’ve got to have boots on the ground. And the Janissaries were the boots on the ground. They also shot guns. We have a wonderful picture of them shooting guns at the walls of Rhodes. The guns really didn’t do a whole lot of work. You needed cannons, but they were shooting guns. This force started changing in the 17th century, because they became made up not just by enslaved Christian boys. There’s got to be some really deep, either spiritual or military, reason for enslaved Christian boys being used. I don’t know what it is. I have not been able to find that. Any rate, civilians could buy their way in. And though they were formidable, in the beginning they resisted changes in European military technology and structure, which was a mistake, and also they didn’t like changing, and so they rebelled when they felt threatened by changes. Despite their loyalty, their complete loyalty, to the Sultans, they would sometimes rebel and then have to get put down. Finally, in 1826 they were executed en masse and also exiled and imprisoned after a failed rebellion against Mehmet his second and so they were done in 1826. So that’s our crime. Janissaries, who were in the forefront of the Ottoman army attack at Rhodes, got bored after the truce, and they stole things and raped people and behaved very badly.

Michelle Butler  12:39 

That’s really interesting.

Anne Brannen  12:51 

You didn’t find this? Did you not know about my crime?

Anne Brannen  15:23 

I didn’t know about that, and I didn’t look at the later history of the Janissaries, and that’s really interesting because of the ways it parallels the Hospitallers. They’re really very similar fighting forces. They’re the elites on both sides, and I didn’t know that they were there all the way down to 1822. We were talking before we started recording about how the Hospitallers survive on Malta until 1793.

Anne Brannen  11:53 

Both of these groups, these military groups, fell to change. The Janissaries could not keep up with technology because they just were them. The Hospitallers were willing to keep up with technology, but they were no longer needed to hold the Holy Land because the Christians had gotten thrown out, and so they had to go elsewhere. So that’s what happened with our siege. What happened to Rhodes and the Hospitallers? I will now tell you. The Ottoman Empire possessed Rhodes after this for four centuries. In 1912 in the Italio-Turkish war, Italy took Rhodes and the German army occupied the island in 1943. In 1945 the Germans surrendered Rhodes to the British, who had a temporary military occupation. In 1947 it was united with Greece, so it’s a Greek island. Yay. The Hospitallers, after they left Rhodes, went briefly to Sicily, before they went to Malta and became the Knights of Malta. They had to send Charles the fifth, who was the Holy Roman Emperor, tribute once a year, of a Maltese Falcon. Now this is not the metal statue with secrets in it that Humphrey Bogart is connected to in that movie that will come many centuries later. This is an actual bird. They had to send a bird. They were in Malta for about 250 years, and they fortified the defenses. They established hospitals and churches, and they established medical schools and eventually a university. They didn’t all go to Malta. Some of them went back to Europe. In the countries that remained Catholic in Europe after the Reformation, some of their buildings still survive. Some of them went back there. The countries that did not remain Catholic, they could not go back to. There’s Hospitaller buildings that survive in Birgu, Castile, Portugal, Aragon, Bavaria and Provence. All of them put to different uses, different civic uses entirely. On Malta, they continued their military activities. Then the Ottomans besieged Malta in 1565, again led by Suleiman who really, really, really wanted Malta. The Hospitallers were worse armed and highly outnumbered by the Ottomans, and the siege went against them for some time, but the Ottomans lost morale and misinterpreted some military intelligence and they departed. But the Hospitallers were losing money because they had been established to fight in the Holy Land, which is how they got a lot of contributions, and none of those contributions were coming in, so money was drawing up. So they had to have a new sort of mission, which at this time became fighting piracy in the Mediterranean and freeing Christian slaves. Fair enough. As their mandate and their money dwindled, they started kind of, you know, veering off. Some of them took local wives and they joined other navies and they plundered non pirate ships, they ended up in the French Navy and the Russian Navy. Those Hospitallers became wealthy and experienced, and from Malta, their policy of policing the Barbary pirates morphed into the policing of all ships passing by. If they thought maybe there were Turkish goods in them, which, as you might know from recent developments in a country that we’re very familiar with, you could suspect everybody of anything, and then you could send them to El Salvador. But anyway, so they suspected Turkish–so what they were doing, they were capturing all these damn European ships. And the Europeans got really, really annoyed, very, very annoyed. Finally, Napoleon captured Malta in 1798 and the Knights were dispersed. So that’s the end of the Knights in Malta. The order survived, though it was diminished, and really the main faction was in Russia, in St Petersburg, and it was the Priory in Russia that generated most of the income. By most, I mean 90%. Pope Leo the 13th in 1879 restored the position of Grand Master to the order, which was revitalized as a charitable religious organization. So it’s still around, only it’s a little different. It doesn’t fight wars or fight piracy either. As far as I can tell, there are several organizations which descend from the Hospitallers, or claim to descend from the Hospitallers, the main one being the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, which settled in Rome in 1834. So it’s the Knights of Malta, but it’s in Rome. It’s a lay religious order. It’s an order of chivalry. I think it’s the oldest surviving order of chivalry, and it’s sovereign. It has observer status at the UN Did you know that?

Michelle Butler  17:38 

No, I did not.

Anne Brannen  17:38 

The Knights of Malta get to observe the UN. They’ve got passports and currency.

Michelle Butler  17:38 

Huh.

Anne Brannen  20:42 

I know. I’m reminded of–what is that wonderful island off England that had its own passport? You had to go through customs to do to it from Dover. It’s an English island, but they made you go through customs.

Michelle Butler  21:58 

Lundy.

Anne Brannen  21:59 

Lundy. So I think they’re kind of like Lundy, but with a little more, I don’t know, gravitas and recognition. And I’m pleased to tell you that the main focus of this sovereign nation of the Knights of Malta is medical. It’s doctors, nurses, paramedics, and they are dedicated to the suffering, poor and marginalized, and especially dedicated to the victims of war. I’m happy about that. It does actually have a mission in Malta. They went and established one, though it doesn’t hold Malta because Napoleon. That is what I had to tell you about the horrible crime of the naughty Janissaries after the seige of Rhodes. That’s what I had. What you got, Michelle? I believe that we are now going into military history.

Michelle Butler  23:08 

I had so much fun with this research. Oh my gosh. I do need to start with a generalized apology about my unanswered emails. Several people have been emailing Michelle Markey butler@gmail.com. I have got them. I have seen them. I have been on book deadline for months, so I haven’t even looked at my professional email account. I am working through them now. I apologize, I’m getting there, but I had a book that had been delayed by a decade that I had to get done.

Anne Brannen  23:08 

But it is getting done, right?

Michelle Butler  23:08 

It is done. Advance Review Copies are coming out real, real, real soon. I’ve seen the cover. I’m very excited.

Anne Brannen  23:11 

It has that heroine that I love so much in it?

Michelle Butler  23:19 

Yes.

Anne Brannen  23:19 

Yay.

Michelle Butler  23:19 

But, but that required a great deal of focus to get it finished. So I haven’t fallen into a hole. I have just had to focus.

Anne Brannen  24:05 

Thank you for making that all clear. I’m very happy to hear this is coming out.

Anne Brannen  25:04 

It should be out by the end of the year. This one’s shorter than the first one was. Little bit shorter. It’s 113,000 words instead of 140. Anyhoo I am answering emails again. So I spent quite a lot of time researching the ways in which the sieges of Rhodes, both of them, are a really sort of pivotal moment in the change between medieval war and siege tactics to early modern tactics. Medieval siege tactics, by and large, are, sit outside and wait for them to starve, and you do have attempts to undermine the walls, but that’s digging under and then, you put in wooden supports, and then when you leave the tunnel, you pull those out and hopefully pull the wall down because there’s nothing supporting it anymore. But between 1480, the first siege of Rhodes, and 1522–it is four decades of incredibly fast military change. Between 1480 and 1522, the role of gunpowder in warfare changes enormously. In 1480 gunpowder weapons are still small and unreliable. There are cannons, but there are also, like, handheld anti personnel–they look like a modern grenade launcher, but that’s anti personnel. You’re aiming at the people on the top, but the range is small, the projectile is small, and the gunpowder is less pure and more unreliable. And the cannons are–there’s only so much you can do in terms of how much gunpowder you can put in there, because they haven’t figured out the process yet for how to get the impurities out of the metal. So if you use too much force, the cannon is going to explode.

Anne Brannen  26:11 

Really. Okay. Okay.

Michelle Butler  28:07 

So in 1480 gunpowder weapons are the backup for traditional medieval weapons. By 1522 it’s the other way around.

Anne Brannen  28:07 

Oh, I see. I’m so glad you looked this all up.

Michelle Butler  26:11 

We have listings where the Grand Master is telling everybody what you have to be armed with, and they all have to have two personal weapons. And you can choose two crossbows, two handguns, or crossbow and a handgun, a crossbow and a longbow. So you’ve got longbow, crossbow, handgun, and you pick any two, but you gotta have two. In 1522 you still have long bows and crossbows being used, but that’s not what you’re going to reach for first. By 1522 there are several technological advances that have happened. The cannon barrel is stronger because they have figured out that if you make it longer than it needs to be, and the mold is the open end up–what you can do then is, the impurities are going to float to the top. When you pour the molten metal in, the impurities float to the top, and then you cut that off. So any air bubbles, any impurities, anything like that, that is still in the metal flows to the top. You cut it off, and now you have a much stronger cannon, which means you can fire more gunpowder. You can fire with more gunpowder and increase the strength of what you’re firing. And the tapered shape comes in also. So instead of it being the same width the whole way–parallel walls–you have these tapered walls, which helps focus the force.

Anne Brannen  31:23 

Let me get this clear–the thing about the pure metal is because any impurities are going to be a weak point in the metal. And that’s why–

Michelle Butler  31:34 

Exactly, exactly, right. That’s why you have to–it’s a similar concept to why you have to really pound clay before you make something out of it and then put it in the kiln. Because if there’s any air bubbles, it explodes when that air heats up.

Anne Brannen  31:47 

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, thank you.

Michelle Butler  31:50 

And exploding cannons is really bad for your side.

Anne Brannen  31:53 

Oh, god yes.

Michelle Butler  31:54 

Another hugely important technological advancement that happens in these 40 years is corned gunpowder. It is being strained through a cloth and all made the same size, so you have little bits of it, instead of it being a powder that is kind of imprecise, now it’s standardized in predictable pieces.

Anne Brannen  32:15 

Why? Why doesn’t just powder work?

Michelle Butler  32:17 

The book that I’m working from here for this is called Rhodes Besieged: A New History. It’s by Robert Douglas Smith and Kelly DeVries. It’s from 2011 and they go through this in very great detail. So anybody who is interested in this is encouraged to find a library, because it was an investment. Making the powder into uniform sized pellets–now I’m quoting “earlier gunpowder makers produced a kind of gunpowder called knollenpulver powder formed into very large cakes, which were then broken down into smaller pieces before using–” Oh, so this is like moving from selling sugar in–

Anne Brannen  33:01 

Yes, yes, yes. Those cones. You can still buy it that way, right, right, right. And then you take it home and you break it up.

Michelle Butler  33:08 

Yeah, yeah. “Corning is different. Once the powder has been produced, it is then wetted, usually with alcohol, and then forced through a sieve to make grains of gunpowder of uniform size.” So it’s much, much easier to get the same amount every time.

Anne Brannen  33:26 

Oh, of course, right. It’s the same thing with sugar. When you’re baking, if you’ve got little lumps of hard sugar, it’s really not the same as having a pile of fine sugar. Okay, got it.

Michelle Butler  33:39 

There are four major technological advancements. The third one is cast iron projectiles instead of stones. Now they are still using stones at the siege of Rhodes.

Anne Brannen  33:49 

You might as well if they’re around.

Michelle Butler  33:51 

Right. The thing about cast iron projectiles is that they’re three times heavier at the same size. So if you have a cannonball that is six inches across, made out of stone, and one made out of cast iron, the cast iron one is going to be three times as heavy.

Anne Brannen  34:09 

I would have thought the stone was heavier. I did not know that.

Michelle Butler  34:12 

And also, because you’re making them in molds, they’re also more standardized. So everything about this is becoming more standardized, which allows it to be replicable and safer.

Anne Brannen  34:25 

Oh, my God. Well, safer for the side that’s sending it outward.

Michelle Butler  34:31 

Yeah, you’re much less likely to have this stuff exploding in your face. That still happens. And then the trail carriage, the device that has wheels that you use to move it around is a development of this time period. You don’t just mount it on a castle and have it stay in the same place. You’ve got it on wheels so you can be moving it back and forth.

Anne Brannen  34:53 

Oh, the trebuchets didn’t–there weren’t wheels, were there? They stayed where you built them.

Michelle Butler  35:00 

I am going to read a giant paragraph from Rhodes Besieged because it summarizes this really, really well. “It is clear then that the period from about 1480 to 1522 saw probably the most important changes in the development of artillery since the introduction of gunpowder artillery at the beginning of the 14th century. Though this seems like an extravagant claim, it is worth remembering that the changes made in this period were those that were to define artillery for the next three and a half centuries.” This blew my mind when I read this–that what is getting established in these 40 years is how artillery fighting happens until the 19th century.

Anne Brannen  35:44 

Good lord.

Michelle Butler  35:47 

Then he goes through those developments I talked about–“the long, thin shape of the cannon barrel, tapered from front to rear to front, corned gunpowder, cast iron ammunition and the trail carriage were all largely developed in the last 20 years of the 15th century. After that, changes were, by and large, minimal and confined mostly to refinements. It is crucial to realize that these changes did not take place rapidly, nor were they universally and quickly taken up.” The point he makes after that is that it’s not like everybody dropped all their old stuff, because it’s too expensive. You have to fight with your old stuff alongside the new stuff. In the same way that if there’s a development in aircraft technology, Southwest doesn’t go throw out all their airplanes and buy all new ones. You buy the new ones as old ones go off.

Anne Brannen  36:35 

I have a question that my rabbit hole didn’t let me find the answer to. Why was it that the Ottoman Turks had this cutting edge artillery and the Hospitallers did not?

Michelle Butler  36:47 

The Ottomans had really, really cutting edge gunpowder technology because they had needed it in 1453 to take Constantinople.

Anne Brannen  36:58 

Oh, my God.

Michelle Butler  36:59 

The Sultan who wanted to take Constantinople knew that the only way he was going to do it was basically to batter down the walls, and so he hired a Hungarian arms engineer, whose name is Orban, to make a just absolutely enormous and cutting edge set of artillery. Now, Rhodes, they had cannons. The Hospitallers had cannons. One of the truly wild things is that 22 of them survive.

Anne Brannen  37:31 

Of the Hospitallers cannons, not the Turks?

Michelle Butler  37:33 

Seven of the Turks cannons survive. 22 of the Hospitallers cannons survive. The difference is because once the Ottomans took Rhodes, they rebuilt the walls, of course, because you don’t want somebody else coming along and taking it back. So they rebuilt the defenses. But then they went off. They really just kind of held the place. They didn’t come in and make a lot of changes. An enormous amount of the defenses survive. I’m going to talk about the defenses in a second. But one of the requirements of the surrender was that they weren’t allowed to take those cannons. They were allowed to take small cannons just to defend their ships, but the big cannons had to stay, and they, more or less, were just left there until the 19th century. This is totally wild, totally totally wild. It’s likely that that explosion that destroyed both the Church of St John and the Palace of the Grand Master in the 19th century, I think it’s 1853–there’s an explosion and it’s probably caused by gunpowder ammunition that had been there since 1522 that had just been shoved in the basement and forgotten about. Is that wild? It’s just wild.

Anne Brannen  38:47 

It’s just like all the stuff that you stick in your garage and then it all blows up. You go, ‘Oh, my God, I should have gotten rid of that.’

Michelle Butler  38:55 

To be fair, that was that great, big, giant explosion–do you remember this?–in Lebanon a couple years ago that was caused by exactly this.

Anne Brannen  39:02 

Oh, really.

Michelle Butler  39:03 

That was an enormous, enormous–I remember it because it was happening about the time we were doing the Gunpowder Plot and it was a really good example of ‘and that’s what it would have been like.’

Anne Brannen  39:15 

Why you do not want to store an enormous amount of gunpowder in your basement and then forget about it.

Michelle Butler  39:20 

So you have all of these changes happen really, really quickly with the offensive weapons, and you have defense trying to keep up. The Hospitallers did have state of the art defense.

Anne Brannen  39:32 

Really? The thickening of the walls–that was all state of the art?

Michelle Butler  39:35 

That was all state of the art. It’s prototyping features that then become standard in star forts.

Anne Brannen  39:42 

Okay. So they could not have done any better.

Michelle Butler  39:45 

They could not have done any better. They ran out of people, more than anything else. They still had supplies of food. They had put 18 months worth of supplies inside of the fortress. They had defenses they never even got to because you have the exterior walls–you have two layers of walls, and in some places, three layers of walls around the city. But you also have an interior wall that divides the Hospitallers’ section of the city from the regular section of the city. So that’s its own kind of interior fortress. And also the Palace of the Grand Master was designed as a citadel where, worst case scenario, they can retreat to the keep. They just ran out of people. They did not have enough people. There is argument about how many attackers the Ottomans brought with them. The Hospitallers records think it’s about 100,000. My military expert here, Kelly DeVries, thinks probably not that many, but possibly 50,000, because you got to be able to put people along 2.2 kilometers of wall, and inside of the city, they have maybe 600 knights and maybe another four to six thousands humans, people who could do things, but not necessarily expert fighters. You have maybe 1500 of that those are trained foot soldiers, but you also have a lot of working people. I’m sorry to report that they did, in fact, practice slavery. So they had enslaved persons in the city that they were forcing to do things. One of the reasons they got in serious trouble is that all of them got killed. And that was the workforce that they were using to rebuild the walls as they were battered down. Eventually they were entirely out of those folks. But they put in all of these updated–so they lower towers, they widen the walls, they widen the dry moats. They have to strengthen the walls in order to be able to put cannon. It’s not like the walls were thin before. I keep finding these things talking about thin medieval walls. Get over yourself. The walls were 12 feet thick.

Anne Brannen  41:58 

Yeah. Medieval walls are humongous.

Michelle Butler  42:00 

I know. These are like 30 feet thick.

Anne Brannen  42:03 

The fact that you have to make them thicker for a new technology doesn’t mean that they weren’t extremely thick to begin with.

Michelle Butler  42:09 

So they have to reinforce the walls, because they’ve got to put their own cannons up there. And those are heavy. They put in these tenailles that are the things at the base of the walls that are basically triangles of earth to absorb the impact. The walls do good for a really long time. There’s all these videos on YouTube that have tourists walking through the city, and I watched a lot of those. And there’s cannonballs embedded in the walls, lots of them. So these features, the points underneath the towers, the bastions, like you were talking about, that go out from the walls and then provide the ability to create covering fire, so that you have no blind spots, so you can have cannons, two or three cannons, focusing at the same spot and able to fire on it. That is in Rhoades. Those are things that have become standard in star forts. There are lots of videos on YouTube as well about the development of star forts. There’s a couple of great ones, actually, about the 1522 Siege. There’s a couple of wacky ones that are about conspiracy theories. I mean, what? I don’t understand this at all. Why is there a conspiracy theory about the origin of star forts? We know where they came from.

Michelle Butler  43:25 

Obama made them right?

Michelle Butler  43:27 

It’s so wild. There’s all these weird things where they’re like, ‘this is a mystical thing, because they’re shaped like a star,’ and it’s aliens.

Anne Brannen  43:37 

Oh, oh.

Michelle Butler  43:37 

 What? What? What? We know where they came from. They came from because you have to have artillery, and you make things into points, so then the cannonballs ricochet off. I loved reading about this, because this is a technology that comes to the United States. I have toured a star fort in the United States. Fort Frederick in Frederick, Maryland is a star fort, and it was built for the American Revolution. This technology is still current by the time–in 1522, there were already Europeans interacting with the Americas by this time. This technology comes to the Americas. So I was all for it. But, but, dude, those conspiracy theories are nuts. Feel free to look them up. But, but, but it’s bunk. Of course, obviously it’s bunk. There are two Hospitallers who were present in 1480 and 1522, and this is a sad story, actually. Philippe Villiers de Il Adam, who was the grand master in 1522, was there as a young knight in 1480. He was, I don’t know, maybe 20, 22. He joined the order when he turned 18.

Anne Brannen  44:53 

So he’s the one that Suleiman says, you know, regrets turning the old man out of his house.

Michelle Butler  44:59 

Yeah. He was 57 or 58 by the time of the siege, and he had only been Grandmaster for a year, because the guy before him died in 1521, but every single Grand Master between 1480 and 1522 knew it was just a matter of time, so they were constantly adding to–Rhodes fell in 1522 not because of a problem with their defenses or their offense. It was that the rest of Europe had no appetite for sending men to do crusade stuff.

Anne Brannen  45:28 

Even the Hospitallers didn’t. Even even other Hospitallers. There’s only one that came.

Michelle Butler  45:34 

There’s no appetite for sending men. They’ll send money, they’ll send the occasional cannon, but they they do not–nobody comes. One Irish Knight shows up. The other guy who was there on the Hospitaller side–we don’t have this information for the Ottoman side, whether there were people who had been there for both sieges, but for the Hospitallers, the other one was Andre de Amaral. And this is a sad story. He also was a young knight in 1480. By 1522 he was chancellor of the order. As things really, really start going south, and people inside of Rhodes start turning on one another, there are rumors that some of them are colluding with the Turks. He is one of the people who was accused of that, and he’s actually executed for collaboration, even though he never confesses to it, even under torture. So I’m inclined to think he was not guilty.

Anne Brannen  46:29 

Yeah, me too.

Michelle Butler  46:30 

So if we need an extra crime, I’m thinking executing this dude when he was almost certainly innocent was a crappy, crappy thing to do. I will restrain myself in terms of talking any more about the defenses and the offenses, although I had a spectacular time reading about it. There is another book called The Fortress of Rhodes: 1309 to 1522, that I recommend people to because it has amazing illustrations. There are side by side illustrations. This is what the wall looked like in 1480, this is what it looked like in 1522, and you can see what’s been added. So awesome. Okay, well, I also have for you the first opera that was written in English. Is about the siege of Rhodes. I actually was kind of wondering whether you put it on the list because of this.

Anne Brannen  46:30 

No, I didn’t. Did you? I thought you put the siege of Rhodes on.

Michelle Butler  46:45 

I don’t think so. But anyway, it appeared on the list, and William Davenant wrote the first opera in English about the siege of Rhodes. I had so much fun reading about this too. Just when I thought I couldn’t possibly find anything any more fun than reading about the cannons and the cannonballs and corned gunpowder. No, no, then I found William Davenant’s opera. I obviously need to read more about Davenant. As somebody who spent a lot of time reading Shakespeare, Davenant usually comes up in the context of Shakespeare as somebody we’re mad at because he has this tendency to rewrite Shakespeare for the Restoration audience, and so he kind of comes up in that context as an opportunistic jerk. I apologize to the shade of William Davenant for having thought of him as an opportunistic jerk. He actually is quite fascinating. He almost became the Governor of Maryland.

Anne Brannen  48:27 

Really?

Michelle Butler  48:28 

Which I was fascinated to find out about. Yeah, he was a royalist. So during the Civil War, during the Civil War, Lord Baltimore, whose–we all remember–whose coat of arms is the state flag of Maryland, and is awesome and so fabulously over the top as a late medieval/early modern coat of arms. But he had sided–Lord of Baltimore had sided with the rebels, and so the Queen of England, Henrietta–Davenant had worked for her, and so she had arranged for him to replace Lord Baltimore as the Lieutenant Governor of Maryland. And he got on a ship and was headed to Maryland, and he got captured. His ship was intercepted and he got captured by the rebels. He was a great choice, actually, to be the Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, because he was a royalist, but he had converted and become a Catholic. So he was great choice to run the Catholic colony, alas, but his ship was intercepted. He was captured and imprisoned in the Tower. He was there for a few years. He was there for a while. Between 1641 and 1649, theaters were officially closed, but not really. They were officially closed, but nobody had any spoons to be dealing with the fact that the actors were still doing plays at the officially closed theaters. But after the rebels actually won, and after the execution of Charles the First in 1649, three of the four public theaters–Salisbury Court, the Cockpit and the Fortune–got the dissolution treatment. Soldiers were sent in to wreck them. Blackfriars somehow escapes, but it’s kind of because the building is in such poor shape, it’s not really anybody’s–you know, who cares? In 1655, Davenant is released from prison. He goes right back to the theater, but now he’s all sneaky-like, which is where we get to the opera.

Anne Brannen  50:16 

The opera. I forgot that’s where we were going.

Michelle Butler  50:18 

In the very next year, 1656, he has a play in his house, Rutland House, and he totally is like, this is not a play. This is absolutely not one of those evil and forbidden plays. No siree. This has entries, not acts. When it was first printed in 1659, it was called ‘The Siege of Rhodes, Made a Representation by the Art of Perspective in Scenes and the Story sung in Recitative Music.’ It’s a play that is sung because you’re not allowed to have plays.

Anne Brannen  51:03 

God, that’s brilliant. That is so brilliant.

Michelle Butler  51:06 

Opera was becoming a thing already–because part of what’s going on is that this is becoming a thing in Italy. It’s a form that’s developing in Italy. Davenant knows about it, because the court in exile in France is very cosmopolitan, so of course, they know about Italian entertainment, and he sees an opportunity. It’s not a play. No. Why would you ever think that?

Anne Brannen  51:32 

Your law says play.

Michelle Butler  51:36 

It’s not a play. We’re singing.

Anne Brannen  51:44 

Why the Siege of Rhodes? Why did he light on that?

Michelle Butler  51:47 

I could not find anything that suggests–I will say, though, that he seems to have picked topics that he thinks will keep the Puritans off his back. And so he is typically picking topics–because he does other plays–sorry, he does other operas.

Anne Brannen  52:07 

No, I don’t want to hear that word come out of your mouth.

Michelle Butler  52:11 

He typically picks topics that he thinks the Puritans will like, which typically are Christians fighting ‘infidels.’

Anne Brannen  52:19 

Right, right, right.

Michelle Butler  52:21 

‘Infidels.’ You hear my quotes?

Anne Brannen  52:23 

Yes, I did hear your quotes. Safe, because it’s not about the Catholics and the Protestants and it’s about just Christians, and they are living a long time ago.

Anne Brannen  52:32 

Yeah, over there.

Anne Brannen  52:32 

Oh yeah, over there.

Michelle Butler  52:34 

This is a profound investment on his part, not just because there’s danger involved. He spent money on this. He wrote the words himself. But then he hired big guns in music. He didn’t just go wander off into the street and find a busker. He hired big names. Henry Cook, who is, confusingly, often called Captain Cook.

Anne Brannen  52:55 

That is confusing. I’m so sorry.

Michelle Butler  52:57 

Henry Laws, Matthew Locke, and Ned Coleman. These are big deals. The only reason he had the money to do this–he just got out of prison. The only reason he had the money to do this is that he had recently met and married a widow who has 800 pounds.

Anne Brannen  53:12 

Uh huh. Well, there you go.

Michelle Butler  53:13 

He actually calls this in one of his letters, “oh, costly opera.” I am sad to tell you that the music does not seem to survive, but the words do, so I’m going to read you one tiny little piece of it to give you an idea of what it sounded like, just as soon as I am able to pull that window up. So this is at the end of entry two, and the women of Rhodes are coming to help defend the city.

Anne Brannen  53:48 

Yeah, that shows up in all the chronicles, doesn’t it? Not.

Michelle Butler  53:51 

Actually, it does. All of the citizens are involved with–

Anne Brannen  53:56 

Okay, all right, I take it back.

Michelle Butler  53:57 

They’re not fighting. They’re caring for the sick, and they’re caring for the wounded, and they’re bringing sandwiches to the–not sandwiches, food and drink to the fighters.

Anne Brannen  54:07 

Molly Pitcher.

Michelle Butler  54:09 

Exactly, exactly. Where do I want to start this? Maybe we don’t want all of that. “Our patches and our curls so exact in each station, our powders and our pearls are now out of fashion. Hence with our needles and give us your spades. We that were ladies grow coarse as our maids. Our coaches have drove us to balls at the court. We must now drive barrows to earth up the port.” So I think it probably reads as not awesome to us, because it rhymes, but it’s actually not bad.

Anne Brannen  54:39 

Okay.

Michelle Butler  54:40 

In 1659, he writes to Cromwell’s government, and he makes the case for why they should consider having public entertainment again. You know, if you have entertainment, people are too busy to think about, you know, sedition. And also, there’s economic impact for London if you keep the wealthy people in town, and the way you do that is that you offer them entertainment. And anyway, things are starting to go south in the Puritan government, because Cromwell dies pretty soon. He dies, and so things are starting to really go south. So nobody gives him a hard time when in 1659, he moves this play–sorry opera–to the newly renovated Cockpit theater–

Anne Brannen  55:34 

Oh God.

Michelle Butler  55:35 

And he expands it into part one and part two, and then he’s getting good results with this. In 1661, he opens his own theater, the Duke of York’s Playhouse in Lincoln’s Inn, and this is the first production there. It is a humongous hit. 14 consecutive performances, which is a big deal. Normally, it’s done in repertoire. Charles the second shows up in person, which we know because Pepys’ diary tells us this. This is the first known time that royalty shows up at the public theater. It is also the first time that we know the name of an actress showing up on the public stage. Her name is Catherine Coleman, and she’s the wife of one of the composers. There are revivals at this playhouse until 1726.

Anne Brannen  56:22 

Wow.

Michelle Butler  56:24 

I did not find any modern productions. This is also an incredibly important production because of the innovations that it brings. Elaborate sets and stage design had become very popular in Italy, and this is where it makes its appearance in England. I was saying before about ‘shown through perspective.’ That’s what they mean–there are big painted perspective backdrops, and we have the drawings for these that have the grid on them. I just want to remind everybody that that doesn’t mean special effects. Special effects were humongous–very popular–in medieval and 16th century drama. This means the elaborately painted backdrops and the proscenium arch stage. This is where it comes in.

Anne Brannen  57:10 

Ah. Okay.

Michelle Butler  57:11 

The work, the opera, is so innovative. It’s bringing sung theater in from Italy. That was a way to get around–but, you know, you do what you got to do. These big, painted, elaborate backdrops, the proscenium arch stage, and an actress. What’s wild about this is that those pieces hang out, but it doesn’t result in a wave of English opera.

Anne Brannen  57:33 

There’s not one that follows it?

Michelle Butler  57:35 

There are a couple, but then it kind of peters out in the early 18th century. Isn’t that wild? I enjoyed reading about this tremendously, and it is really, really fascinating that he picks the Siege of Rhodes as being this almost cinematic story. There are a couple of other fun things that I didn’t dig into quite as much, but they’re fun to know. Of course, tourism is a humongous deal in Rhodes, and the walls largely survive. They were repaired by the Ottomans after they took over. There is something there called the Palace of the Grand Master that has no connection, hardly at all, with the medieval one, on account of that blew up in 1853 because of storing old gunpowder in the basement, and then Mussolini took it into his head to rebuild it, but just however seemed best to him with no consultation with anything. So if you do look at it, don’t think, man, why were they doing that? That is a 1940s fantasy of what a medieval palace should look like.

Anne Brannen  58:39 

That’s probably headache inducing.

Michelle Butler  58:42 

Yeah, it’s kind of wild. There is a band called the Siege of Rhodes, a rock band. G A Henty is at it again. This is that English author who wrote adventure stories for boys in the late 19th century. He wrote a book in 1895 called a Kight of the White Cross that is about the Siege of Rhodes. And fascinatingly, there is a novel called The Siege of Rhodes from 1985 that was written in Japanese by a Japanese author and has been translated. There might be other novels about the Siege of Rhodes. If there are, I cannot find them. AI has tried to convince me a couple of times that Davenant wrote a novel called The siege of Rhodes in 1909. He did not.

Anne Brannen  59:24 

AI is losing its mind. The stuff it says is just so funny. I know that I could like turn it off and I wouldn’t have to look at it, but I keep it on because I find it hilarious.

Michelle Butler  59:34 

There are quite a few novels, though, about the Siege of Malta, including one by Sir Walter Scott.

Anne Brannen  59:40 

No–yes, of course. We hadn’t heard about Scott in a while, so I’m okay with that.

Michelle Butler  59:47 

So quite a few of those, not as many about the Siege of Rhodes, which I think is a tragedy, because I think this is just as fascinating and cinematic and has wonderful personalities on both sides. We have all of this fiction about Philip Augustus and Richard the first and Saladin. And I feel like, if we can have that, we should be able to have it with this too, because you have the very similar dynamic. These people who respect each other even as they’re fighting each other. And Davenant, who I definitely, most definitely need–I was reading a piece of a biography from 1987 about him that covers just this part, but I clearly need to read more about it. He was definitely Shakespeare’s godson, and there’s rumors that he was his natural child. I don’t think that’s probably true. I think that’s people probably just being scurrilous. So why are they implying that his mom was unfaithful with no evidence. That’s rude. But I have more respect for Davenant now. He was a theatrical entrepreneur, not just an opportunist mucking about with Shakespeare. But that is all I have, other than a giant, enormous list of sources that I will send you.

Anne Brannen  1:00:56 

We’ll put them in the notes. I have one more thing that I will tell you, which is completely, completely inconsequential and only slightly connected. But, you know, I did mention the Maltese Falcon before.

Michelle Butler  1:01:11 

Oh yeah.

Anne Brannen  1:01:12 

This is a piece of text that comes from–in the film, The Maltese Falcon comes, it comes after the first credits. You’re gonna love this. “In 1539 the Knight Templars of Malta–“

Michelle Butler  1:01:25 

What??

Anne Brannen  1:01:29 

We are in Hollywood. “–paid tribute to Charles the fifth of Spain by sending him a Golden Falcon encrusted from beak to claw with rarest jewels. But pirates seized the galley carrying the priceless token, and the fate of the Maltese Falcon remains a mystery to this day.” I will tell you exactly what happened to every single Maltese Falcon that the Knights of Malta sent to the whole Roman Emperor. They are dead. Oh, my God, it’s a great movie. I love it, but it hasn’t got anything to do with the Knights of Malta.

Michelle Butler  1:02:01 

Just a reminder for everybody, the Templars were gone. Templars met the horrible fate that we talked about in that episode, where Philip the fourth wanted to steal their stuff, and so he pretended like they were bad people, and that was 200 years before.

Anne Brannen  1:02:16 

Yes, and they weren’t on Malta anyway. Yep.

Michelle Butler  1:02:18 

The Knights Templar of Malta. It’s like word salad. History word salad.

Anne Brannen  1:02:23 

Yeah, and probably it shows up on AI sometimes. ‘The Knights Templar were on Malta and had a golden Falcon.’

Michelle Butler  1:02:31 

Gracious sakes. I will say it’s a bit rich for the Hospitallers to head over to Malta and then start fighting piracy in the Mediterranean on account of them having been committing piracy in the Mediterranean for a good 150 years from Rhodes.

Anne Brannen  1:02:49 

Irony abounds, does it not? 1000 years of people doing things that are ironic. Well, that’s our discussion of the Siege of Rhodes, which did have a crime, even if it happened kind of right after the Siege of Rhodes. We had one. Thank you for hanging around. And the next time that you hear from us, we’re going to be about the same time frame, 1524, but we’re going to go to Germany. We’re going to do the great German peasants revolt.

Michelle Butler  1:03:16 

Oh. I don’t know anything about that.

Anne Brannen  1:03:19 

No, me neither. I don’t know how we found it. Let’s go find out. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. Technology was a big piece of this one. You can find us on Spotify and Apple podcast, any place where the podcasts are hanging out and we ourselves are at truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. And there you can find links to the podcast, links to the show notes, links to the transcripts. And there is also an index where you can find things if you want to know what other things have been done, and you can leave comments, and you can get a hold of us, and if you have any medieval crimes that you think we haven’t covered because you couldn’t find them in the index, let us know. They might or might not be on our list, which is a very long list, but it doesn’t have everything, because 1000 years of people behaving badly over an entire continent, it’s a lot of badness. There is so much badness. Not more badness than there is now. But you know, a lot of badness.

Michelle Butler  1:04:21 

I’m gonna throw in the bonus crime of wrecking three of the four public theaters for no good goddamn reason.

Anne Brannen  1:04:32 

Why not? Why not? We’ll throw that in. Anyway, that’s us for today. Bye.

Michelle Butler  1:04:39 

Bye.

114. Beehive Stolen, Portugal 1435

Anne Brannen  0:23 

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I am Anne Brannen, and I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:32 

And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:36 

Today, today we’re really happy, because we get to talk about bees. We’re covered in bees, and we’ve got a crime. We actually have a crime. There were many, many bee crimes in the Middle Ages. We’re going to talk about–our focus is that in 1435 in Portugal, some guy–we don’t know his name–some guy stole hives and their honey, and it was a felony, so he got imprisoned, although he got acquitted later. All right. Somebody stole the hives, and so that’s our crime. That’s actually all we know about it. Everything else we’re going to tell you is context, but we’re really happy, because we just love this. Although I’m going to start out with something that Michelle doesn’t know I’m going to be talking about. But the last time that we were having our little recording session, Michelle shared with us all some fairly stupid things that Google’s AI had said. I’m going to top that. What I did was, I searched ‘theft of beehive, Portugal, 1435.’ Here’s what AI said, and I’m going to quote directly for a while, “there’s no evidence or historical record for a beehive being stolen in Portugal in 1435. The concept of a ‘stolen beehive'”–it’s like, obviously been phrased as if I was an idiot. I’m going to say stolen beehive. It’s a dumb thing to say. I go back into AI– “in that era is anachronistic.”

Michelle Butler  2:05 

Hahahaha. Sorry.

Anne Brannen  2:08 

It can’t be wrong. It’s Google AI. “As the practice of bee keeping and the study of bee behavior were quite different from today, while beekeeping existed” –well, that’s true, yay– “the focus was primarily on honey production and the management of bee swarms, rather than the theft of entire hives.” They go on because they know a lot, AI does. They know all things. “In 1435 beekeeping practices were less sophisticated. Hives were often simple structures, and the concept of a ‘stolen beehive'”–you idiot–“as a whole unit being taken away wasn’t a common concern.” –Also, you’re going to love this, Michelle– “Historical records from that period are not detailed enough to document such a specific event.”

Michelle Butler  3:06 

Oh. My God.

Anne Brannen  3:08 

I don’t know why you thought there were any historical records from 1435,

Michelle Butler  3:13 

Google, AI, shit is, pardon my French, but it is exactly..I mean, there’s a reason students love it, when they’re behind the eight ball and need to write a paper, because it writes just like them.

Anne Brannen  3:26 

Yes, and unfortunately, it often says much of the same thing, although I had many brilliant students, AI is not one of them. “While bees may rob other hives for honey, this is a different behavior than stealing a hive.” Okay. So I said to myself, well, this really is nonsense, and also hilariously funny. So I immediately searched with different terms. I searched ‘medieval laws, beekeeping,’ and AI having not remembered what it just told me, said this, I quote, “medieval laws and beekeeping often emphasize the value of honey and wax, and led to specific regulations concerning ownership, theft–” theft? oh, my God “–and the sharing of produce, produce from hives, bees and their products were so important that theft of bees or honey was often treated as a serious crime with significant penalties,” a thing which I did not know when I told you the other stuff three seconds ago. So I wanted to start with that, Michelle, because I thought you’d like it.

Michelle Butler  4:37 

Oh, my god, yeah. My experience with it was not so funny when I was trying to look for novels, but it did keep pointing me, attempting to point me towards novels that had absolutely nothing to do with but claimed it did, so it would say, you know, this novel over here is set in the Middle Ages, and it absolutely, I pinky swear, mentions bees. No, it does not. I found some, but no help from freaking Google.

Anne Brannen  5:14 

Google’s AI is not good on historical bees. You can find stuff, but you have to go beyond their little AI summation of stupidity, but I was happy to learn that there were no records in 1435 because God, that makes our life easier, doesn’t it? Oh, and we can throw out a bunch of stuff that we already did in the podcast.

Michelle Butler  5:33 

What is truly awesome about this is the ways in which it is channeling the absolute uninformed confidence of a sophomore. Of course, there’s no records from the 15th century, because how could there possibly be? It’s so long ago.

Anne Brannen  5:47 

It’s really long ago. Yeah, they didn’t have Red Bull or whatever, and so they couldn’t write anything down. Yeah. So we have a little tiny thing that happened, which was that somebody steals some bees and got in trouble. And we have an enormous amount of verbiage from AI that doesn’t go anywhere. What we’re going to talk about, really, is context. And so I’ll start on that, because we actually do have some things that we found out, some of them even older than 1435. Michelle, who knew?

Michelle Butler  6:12 

Whoa.

Anne Brannen  6:14 

Like 8000 to 2000 BC cave paintings in eastern Spain, they show honey being harvested from wild honey hives that are in caves. So that’s our first clear documentation of humans get honey. We would have been doing it before, but we got a cave painting from 8000 to 2000 BC. So that’s one. The Egyptians kept bees. They were using honey for sweetening and medicinal purposes, because, you know, it’s antibiotic and tax. Honey for tax paying. We don’t have any specific laws that were extant, but there must have been laws, because they were using it for taxation. So if you’re using something as official money going to your government, you end up having to make laws about it, because often people don’t like to pay that. But we’ve got illustrations from walls and temples and the like, showing cylindrical hives, which I will get into, from the 10th to 9th century BCE. That’s the oldest of the archeological evidence of beekeeping that we have. This is in Tel Rehov in northern Israel. It’s cylindrical beehives, as we see in the Egyptian paintings, cylindrical beehives made from clay. And this is a large apiary, and there’s like a bit of a bee’s eye and wing. That’s what we’ve got, but DNA, woo hoo–the bit of a bee does not come from the local area, where the bees are really aggressive and they don’t produce much. So why would you make a giant apiary? They come from Anatolia in what’s now Turkey. What this shows this is extremely sophisticated beekeeping, just in the earliest archeology that we have this. Screw you, AI Google. It’s extremely sophisticated beekeeping and the transport of bees over borders and long distances, because these are the bees you want, rather than the ones you’ve got around, which are annoying. And the cylindrical log shaped beehives. They’re made out of clay, and they were used throughout the Middle East, although also they were upright cylinders made out of cork or logs. They’ve been found in Sardinia, Tuscany and in the Aegean. In Greece itself, the mainland itself, there were stone hives with square or rectangular cubicles. You look at them and they, you know, they look like a grid with square openings. And there are some fragments of tablets there, one of which says public hive. At any rate, there you could use clay tablets to say who owned a hive. And vertical clay beehives, which kind of looked like flower pots, show up in the same area. They look like flower pots, and you could cover them over at the top, and they have a little opening at the bottom for the bees to go in and out. And they could be moved. Unlike the stone hives or the clay cylinders, they could be moved. Sometimes you really want to be able to do that, either because of the weather, or you want to take your bees someplace where they get more foraging, or maybe you’ve agreed to rent them out to somebody nearby, which we still do. You can see trucks with beehives on the back of them going places, and what they’re doing is somebody’s taking beehives over to someone’s field for some amount of money so they can get their fields pollinated. A side note, the bees are endangered. There’s a bunch of species which are dead already. One of my Ukrainian friends who has bees told me yesterday that the bees are not doing well right now in Ukraine because of the rain. You would think, Oh, they’re not being well because they’re being bombarded. No, no. Nature. It’s the rain. I was reminded of that podcast we did on the Great Famine, where it rained essentially for three years straight. I was like, Oh, great. That’s not what we need. Yeah, because we really need the bees not to disappear, because if they do, we will run out of things to eat.

Michelle Butler  10:07 

Yeah, I did actually see things that were talking about the 14th century, because of that famine, because of all the rain was a rough time on the bees.

Anne Brannen  10:15 

Yeah, it’s not good. You want some rain, but you don’t want continual rain, although those flower pot, those clay flower potty type things could be moved. They couldn’t be moved–this is a side note. They couldn’t be moved as easily as wicker woven skips. If someone says to you, old beehives, you probably have a picture in your head of this kind of dome shaped wicker thing, which did exist. This is not a lie, but it comes later, comes from Northern Europe in the 12th century. So before that, did we have beehives? Before that, we did. We were beekeepers, but we did not have skips. In the snake room at Knossos in Crete, there’s beekeeping paraphernalia found. You know, the stuff you–you need to be able to smoke the bees, for instance. So you need a thing that makes smoke. And there’s an illustration there on one of the walls that shows a clay bowl with preparations in the bottom of it, and it’s been heaped with honeycomb, and so the honey is dripping through. This is actually a pretty smart way of getting the honey out of a honeycomb. It’s not as efficient as what we do now. We put the honeycomb in this centrifugal force machine, whirls it all around, and the honey flies out to the sides of the cylinder. It’s really exciting and quite–honey extraction rooms are always messy. You can’t extract honey without everything getting fairly sticky. But this is a pretty good method. It would take a while, though, and you’d want to move the comb around, because some of honey would be stuck places. But it’s a good method, and it also means that you don’t get any larva in it, because one of the issues going on throughout early beekeeping–before, basically the 19th century, is that it’s extremely difficult to keep the Queen located in one place in the hive, and if she’s going all around round, then you end up with larva throughout the entire hive, which you don’t want. Honey is antibiotic, but not if you leave the larva and eggs in it– it rots really quickly, so that’s no good. You need to get it out. And it also means that if you can’t keep the queen in one place, you almost always have to destroy the hive in order to get the honey, because you don’t know where the queen is. And if there is no queen, you have no hive. Got to have a queen. So this is a good method, though, at least for getting the honey out. In Europe, beekeeping spread onto the continent by Roman times. Beekeeping was already in eastern England. But before that, there was honey gathering because, as with the cave painting we’ve got, you don’t have to keep bees in order to have honey. You can forage, you know, like bears do. Like Winnie the Pooh, you can go and get the honey and then fall into gorse bushes. Which happens a lot, I gather, I don’t know. So before beekeeping came into Europe, there was gathering of honey out of trees, which led into some of the early ways that bees were kept in Northern Europe, by having your own tree or finding a tree in your land and then fixing it up. It turned into creating hives out of trees. By the way, in Lithuania, which has this long history with bees, both economically and spiritually, there’s a Lithuanian bee museum where one can learn that hollowed out tree trunks were, in antiquity, were used for having bees nearby. And what you could do–I find this fascinating–you could cut the top off a tree, and so the tree would grow thicker and shorter, and there would be more places that you could make a hole for bees to make honey. It’s this liminal space in between, we have foraged beehive honey and we have kept the bees over at our house. You know, it’s this liminal space. We are in the forest, but we cut the tree all up and made it into a much more useful thing. Even if you didn’t cut the tree, the top off of a tree, if you found a tree with wild bees in it, you could protect the hive there. Could cut off some pieces of the branches around and you could put a panel over the hole that the bees were coming in and out of with it, with a smaller hole for them to come in and out. So you’re creating a flight entrance, so they’re just coming in one way. And also you’re protecting the hive. If you do that, you can mark the little panel with your name. This will come into all the legal stuff later. You know, we’re focusing on Europe, and we went to Egypt and the Middle East. But I also want to mention, because it is only fair, that the Mayans also used hollowed out logs cut down, and they look kind of like a drum, have a covering over them, and they had carvings on the outside which could include the name of the owner of the hive. The Spanish were quite impressed by this when they came through, and they tell us that a Mayan apiary could hold 1000s of these drums. So the Mayans were doing pretty sophisticated stuff too. But we go to laws. The earliest laws we found are Hittites, so Anatolia whichis now in Turkey–which, you remember, is the nice bees come from? If you’re in Israel and you want better bees, you get them from Anatolia. This is 1500 BCE. The bees were highly prized. And I love this, because it’s not just for them. You can send your bees elsewhere. You’d have to provide a queen, but that can be done. I used to get them in the mail. The post office no longer will allow bees to go through the mail, but I used to get mine in the mail. But if you order a swarm of bees, you get the queen. She’s in a little special container that has kind of sugar covering over a grate, and so the other bees attempt to get through the sugar covering because they want to kill her. They don’t know who the hell she is, but by the time they get through the sugar, they’re like, oh, yeah, that’s our queen. We love her. When you get everything there, you let her out, and then all the bees go into the hive, and the first ones who get there, they say, Yeah, this is pretty good. They go out to the baseboard of the hive, and they they stand in rows facing the hive, and they do their wings so as to get the scent to the other bees to tell them come here. And then the other bees kind of line up and walk in. So that’s getting the bees. So the Hittites sent them around, and we have tablets from the Hittites that have laws about bees, about honey bee theft. Getting bees to sting the thief was an early punishment.

Michelle Butler  16:14 

That’s pretty clever.

Anne Brannen  16:15 

Yeah, that’s pretty good, I think, although then a fine that was about the equivalent of a sheep, that became the punishment. But as to later laws in Ireland in the seventh century, Michelle, were you telling me that these are the first European written laws about bees?

Michelle Butler  16:30 

It is the first surviving complete Irish law book.

Anne Brannen  16:36 

Oh, okay, okay, yeah. It’s in Trinity College, okay.

Michelle Butler  16:39 

Which tells you something honestly.

Anne Brannen  16:42 

Yeah, so this is seventh century, and the section on bees alone, that’s 20 pages. They took their bees very, very seriously. That section is called the Befretha. It’s just about the bees within this enormous bunch of laws, because the Irish were very serious. Here are just a few of the Brehon laws about bees. When your bees foraged on a neighbor’s land, you owed them some honey. If your bees swarmed onto somebody else’s land, you were owed some of the honey, because they’re getting all of it now. If you got stung by bees but had not provoked them, you were owed some honey. But if you were killed by the bees, your family got two hives. If a bee stung you in the eye–now this is a very special law. All laws come from something that was happening that we need to stop. Well, this happened once. If a bee stung you in the eye, you got to keep the hive and all the honey. Congal Cáech, the king of Tara, had been blinded by a bee, and because he was blinded by a bee, he could no longer be the king of Tara, because you had to be whole. You had to be physically whole, and you weren’t, if you were partly blind– so he judged, this is the judgment that he made before they threw him out–he judged that the bee hives should be forfeit, and if you couldn’t tell which hive the bee came from, the people that owned the hives nearby had to throw lots, and whoever lost, I suppose, had to forfeit the hive. So that’s one of the Brehon laws. If you harvested a swarm from somebody else, you had to give them three quarters of the honey. If you harvested or tended to swarm in a tree on somebody else’s land, the two of you split the honey equally, because one of you is doing the work and one of you has the land. That seems fair. If the swarm was found on common property, the person who found it gave 1/9 of the hive to the chief of the tribe. So it was on common land, it’s your hive. You get to take care of it until you destroy it and get all the honey, and then you give a ninth of it to the tribe. They’re really intricate laws on these, 20 pages of them. Now Charlemagne. Charlemagne ordered that all the manors in his empire had to keep bees and to give two thirds of the honey to the crown. You remember what I was saying about the Egyptians and taxation, you got to write this stuff down, or at least make everybody remembers it and memorizes it. If you have a hive, you owe me, the leader of all things, a certain amount. With Charlemagne, it was two thirds of your damn honey. So you just pass that on over. King Alfred. England, ninth century. The stealer of bees had to pay a fine, which was the same fine as that for stealing gold.

Michelle Butler  19:25 

Wow.

Anne Brannen  19:26 

Yeah, we love our bees. Clovis. King Clovis–this is around 500. This is Frankish law–also declared fines for stealing bees. Under Henry the third, in his 1217 Charter of the Forest, which is this kind of supplement to the Magna Carta. The supplement’s more about the non nobles, not what the barons have to do, but what other people. Free men have the right to any wild bees on their land. That’s a big deal because you remember, there’s times in English law where all the land belongs to the king, except for your little garden or you’re not allowed to forage tree branches in the king’s forest, but if you have bees, wild bees on your land, you get to have them. If your own bees swarm and go to somebody else’s land, rules from that situation change from place to place and time to time, and in general, the hive can’t be called yours unless you’ve kept the swarm in sight continually, because it might be another swarm, mightn’t it, we don’t know, and we’re not doing the DNA to find out if they came from Anatolia. Even if you did, and you know it’s your swarm, you’re not always entitled to go on to another person’s land to get your swarm, because it’s trespassing. And of course, also, the sideline to this is that when the bees go to somebody else’s land to forage, they are trespassing. This is a problem in a lot of places. Also, how do you mark the hive as yours? What happens sometimes, somebody comes and gets your hive before you can actually mark. It’s all very, very tricky. Any rate. Clovis, 1241–oh, and remind me, because I want to talk about wild bees in a sec, but I’m going to get through the laws. Michelle and I have talked about this, that we had so many things, that organizing this, all of our wonderful things that we love so much, became a sort of monstrous thing to do. So I don’t know if we’re organized, but we’re having a lot of fun. I’m in 1241, Denmark, the laws of Jutland. This covers bee wars, meaning the bee wars amongst themselves, because bees aren’t necessarily always kind and gentle to their kind. Sometimes they go and rob other hives’ honey, and sometimes they go and attempt to take over a hive. Okay, well. We’re in Jutland, and what happens when, what if you’ve got a beehive and some other bees come to get it and oh, my God, if one man’s bees overtake another man’s bees–in other words, attack another man’s bees, then he who has the bees that got attacked together with some other neighbors–you got to get some friends together– shall announce this to the guy that owns the attacking bees. And then they have to try and work this out. If he who has these lively bees, because that’s apparently what you call attacker bees, they’re very lively. If he who has these lively bees wants to establish a partnership with the other person–this is before you know who has won the war, because once you know who’s won the bee war, then this doesn’t really count. But you know that you’re being attacked, you go and you say, your bees are attacking, your lively bees are attacking my bees. And if they say, let us establish a partnership, then that’s great. Whatever happens, you both get half the honey. Yay. However, however, if the guy with the lively bees refuses to have a partnership, and then it turns out that it’s his bees that get destroyed, he does not get anything because he was not willing to share both gain and loss with the other guy. That’s really quite interesting, isn’t it.

Michelle Butler  22:55 

The sheer number of bee laws was almost overwhelming.

Anne Brannen  22:59 

Maybe that’s what happened to AI? It blew its little circuits when I asked it that specific question about Portugal. And so it was like, ‘No, there’s no bee laws, shut up, you dummy.’

Michelle Butler  23:11 

‘I’m not gonna look and you can’t make me.’

Anne Brannen  23:13 

Oh, God. What am I doing now? So back onto laws. The background to this particular law. Northern Europe, using trees and log hives, as I’ve mentioned. And so especially in places like Lithuania and the Baltic countries, which were more densely populated than other places that had a lot of agriculture. And the more agriculture you’ve got, the fewer tree hives you’re getting–doesn’t this only make sense–and they had not become Christianized so quickly as some other places, especially in Lithuania, as we know– please see our podcast set in Lithuania, where I talk about the snakes–and there’s a great deal of variation in the north concerning how to use the forest, because the pagans had cherished their forests, and the Christians came on in. There’s these laws once the Christians come in, about how and when honey can be harvested from trees, since many of the honey trees are no longer on what would have been common land for the pagans, so are they allowed to get this? So 1349, in Livania. The Master of Livania ruled that a third of the honey and wax from bees that were in trees along the Duna–the river– belonged to the Livonians, but a third was to be sent to Riga. So in other words, splitting the honey on up. And in Spain, in Valencia, the kings taxed the Muslims’ beehives. There was really this tiny little tax. I mean, really, with all this, ‘give me beehive money, as much as if it was a sheep or gold,’ I mean, really, no, we’re talking like pennies. But at any rate, I think it’s the idea you have to give us money for the damn honey. In 1445, in Portugal, a man robbed his father of hives and some bread and wine, and he got exiled in Auerbach. You would be fined for cutting down a tree that could be a bee tree, even if it didn’t have any bees in it yet, and you yourself had not tried to make it into a bee tree, so you could get fined for that. But if you cut down a tree that already had bees in it, they cut your hand off. Also, in 1357, in Poland, there was an ordinance for cutting down trees that had been made ready for bees. So not one that was just standing there that you could make into, or one that had bees in it, but one that you were working on, if somebody cut it down. There was an ordinance. There was a fine under the Welsh laws of how far the value of the bee tree in a forest is due to the owner of the land. So if you do things to any of the bee trees, you’ve got to give them money. All right. Before I get into my next topic, bees as weapons, I just want to make a remark about we say ‘wild bees.’ And when we say wild bees, we mean bees that are living in trees that we haven’t lured the bees there, or sent the bees there from the post office, or sometimes we say wild bees when we mean swarms, bees that have gone with a queen and swarmed, and they’re looking for another place. That’s when the bees are the least problematic. They’re all hanging around the queen. They have sent out some scouts to find a place to live. But they are not protecting a hive, and they are not having a foraging route that if you stand in the middle of, they get you. They are simply protecting the Queen, a whole big bunch of them, while scouts go out and they are not going to hurt you. They’re just not. They look very horrible. Oh my god. But they’re fine. So I just wanted to say that about bees. That’s what we call the wild bees. But there are no domestic bees. Bees have not been domesticated. You can cultivate them, and what we mean by that is the humans figure out a way to make a place that the bees might want to be. That’s it. We can’t make the bees stay there. We can try to lure them there. We can try to give them things that’ll help them be happy. We take them places where they might be. We can give them antibiotics these days if they’re getting bee disease. But they are not domesticated. They are always just themselves and it’s we who learn to live with the bees. It’s not the bees that learn to live with us. So I just needed to say that, because I love them so much. Okay, so we have these examples of bees being used as weapons. In 908 for instance–this, I think, is my favorite use of bees as a weapon–in 908, in Chester. The Scandinavians were besieging Chester, and they couldn’t get into Chester, because the Roman walls, which actually are still there, almost in their entirety, and you can go see and they’re very lovely. They couldn’t get through the walls, and so they dug a tunnel under the walls, and what the defenders did was they took the beehives in the city and they dumped them down the tunnel. And so the Vikings went away.

Michelle Butler  27:55 

I can understand that.

Anne Brannen  27:56 

In the 30 Years War–this is a little bit later, but I want to add, there’s two things from around that period. This has gone into early modern. In the 30 Years War, Swedes stormed Kissingen in Germany this, and the Germans dropped beehives onto the soldiers, so they’re standing on the wall, and they dropped beehives onto the soldiers. The soldiers actually had a lot of armor and stuff on them, which is like an unwieldy bee suit, but kind of acts like a bee suit. So they weren’t the ones that were–probably was the horses. And we have a lot of evidence of bees being put into beehives, being put into places where they killed the neighbors horses. Which would it be because the horses got into the way of the flight path. The bees do not attack you, unless there’s some reason for it. You get into the flight path, or you open up the hive without taking precautions, or, I don’t know, you throw a beehive onto soldiers. So anyway, that didn’t work, so the soldiers had to go away. Also, in the 1600s in Germany, we’ve got an example of nuns, where they were living was at that time called Wuppertal, and what they did was, when they were being attacked, they knocked all their hives over, and they very quickly ran in to their house so that the bees were not attacking them but the soldiers and this worked. This worked, and so now the town is called Bee town. Danberg. The Romans catapulted hives so you could do that.

Michelle Butler  29:20 

Oh, interesting. I didn’t find that.

Anne Brannen  29:23 

And in fact, although bees won’t go over water, you can use them at sea. We have descriptions of naval battles where beehives were catapulted onto the other ships.

Michelle Butler  29:33 

Interesting.

Anne Brannen  29:33 

In World War One, beehives were being thrown onto the enemy, and so it was still working. Yeah, I didn’t go into the use of these now in war, but it isn’t like they wouldn’t be useful if you wanted.

Michelle Butler  29:45 

I was intrigued when I was doing my research about how much problem there still is with theft.

Anne Brannen  29:54 

I know. I didn’t say anything about it, but it’s a big deal.

Michelle Butler  29:57 

It is a humongous deal. There is still all kinds of problems with theft of hives, with people coming and stealing from the hives. It was actually interesting when I was first starting the research, because that was what was coming up first, the ways in which people are trying to prevent contemporary theft.

Anne Brannen  30:18 

In Tennessee, they recently made it a felony to steal bees.

Michelle Butler  30:23 

Oh, wow, wow,

Anne Brannen  30:26 

Yes, equivalent to a sheep or gold.

Michelle Butler  30:28 

I kind of knew this was a big deal. I didn’t know how much of a big deal it was before I started doing this research.

Anne Brannen  30:36 

The only good thing about that to me is that it means that some people still think that bees are valuable. Yay. Because we really do have to take care of the bees. We really do. And please everybody learn the difference between a bee and a wasp. It’s really easy to tell. They don’t look the same. The wasps are evil, evil, evil bastards that will sting you, many, many, many, many, many times just because they see you–they just would as soon get you as look at you. But the bees are not like that. Each one of them can only sting you once, because they die otherwise by having their guts pulled out, I’m sorry to say, so therefore they will not attack you unless they have to. So you just be nice to bees and they will not hurt you.

Michelle Butler  31:17 

I very much enjoy the lady I follow on Instagram who goes and rescues honey bee nests from the most astonishing places, like, hey, this washing machine has been sitting out behind our garage for 30 years. Oh, my God, it’s full of honey.

Anne Brannen  31:32 

She will get the swarm out. She’ll take it out as a swarm.

Michelle Butler  31:35 

Yeah, she’s a beekeeper. She shows up with a box, and she very carefully cuts the wax out and puts it in the frames. And then she finds the Queen and puts her in a little clip, and then puts the Queen over into the new hive. And then just waits while they all make their way over in there. Then once they’re all in, she takes them off to her farm. But the places that she rescues random hives from are just astonishing. Like, hey, we noticed the walls buzzing. Do you think there might be anything to that? And, oh, there’s something orange leaking out of the outlet. And she comes, and she cuts the wall open, and there’s like, 80 years of honey in there.

Anne Brannen  32:17 

Oh, God, if any of our beloved listeners, if you do find bees in your house or there’s a swarm in the tree, but just don’t freak out. They’re not going to hurt you. Do your Googling and call a local beekeeper. They will be able either to come get the swarm, or they will be able to tell you where to go. The beekeepers all hang together so they will be able to help you find someone to get them and don’t–don’t go in there. Don’t go in there with axes, even if you have a net over your head. Just don’t do it. Don’t hurt the bees. Get somebody to get them, just doing a service to the world so that we don’t die from having no bees. Plus it’ll be fun any rate. So yeah, Michelle.

Michelle Butler  32:57 

I spent so much time reading about the economics of bees in the Middle Ages, because what I stumbled onto eventually is a research project, a current research project called Bees in the Medieval World, that is run by Alexandra Sapoznik. She is a senior lecturer in late medieval history at King’s College London. This is her and several of her colleagues working on this project, and what they’re particularly interested in is the economics of how bees worked in the Middle Ages. And it was absolutely astonishing to learn– some of this stuff was just astonishing. So they have been in archives everywhere–you will enjoy seeing the list of the ‘archives we went and dug into’ on their website, because it’s a lot. One of the points that their research has uncovered, she and her colleagues’, is that they are different trade markets. So wax and honey are both bee products, but they have entirely different economies of trading. So, for example, wax is humongous in Christian Europe. There is no possible way that Europe can create on its own the amount of wax it uses. I didn’t know that Westminster Abbey alone, for example–she was digging into the archives of the 14th century. Westminster Abbey, all by itself, uses 1300 pounds,

Anne Brannen  32:58 

Whoa.

Michelle Butler  32:58 

Of wax per year, just for the main church, so not even any of the little attaching chapels.

Anne Brannen  32:58 

Oh, my God.

Michelle Butler  32:58 

Just for the main church because of the candles.

Anne Brannen  33:44 

Oh, yeah, yeah, you gotta have the candles, yeah.

Michelle Butler  33:49 

And different areas specialize in different products. So what they found is that the best wax comes from the Baltic region.

Anne Brannen  33:49 

Oh, I love it that the Baltics are providing the best wax, even though not all of them are really enormously Christian yet,

Michelle Butler  34:19 

Nope, but they sure are providing the wax. What’s going on, is that there’s this really interesting, interesting interrelation of religion and trade, because in Christian Europe, you need a bunch of candles. And beeswax candles are the best. They smell amazing. I did see a couple of arguments that were trying to connect to this up with the cultural use that is made of bees–because they didn’t really understand how they were propagating. Some parts of Europe knew that the main bee was a queen. But some of them thought it was a king, because it was the only thing that made sense to them, that if you’re gonna have a great, big one that’s in charge, hello, it’s gonna be a king, obviously. Now by the time of John Geddes 17th century–this is the first English beekeeping guide, from 1675, called The English Apiary, or the Complete Bee Master. I looked. There isn’t anything in here about–there is some stuff in there about things that harm bees. But humans aren’t what he’s talking about. This book is about how to keep them alive. And so it’s talking about, mice will crawl in there and chew on the wax, which–

Anne Brannen  36:22 

Oh, God, they do.

Michelle Butler  36:22 

I didn’t know that. That’s really interesting. So that’s the first complete beekeeping guide in English. And by that time, it is known that the major bee is a queen. But earlier than that, there isn’t one answer over all of Europe. Some places know that it’s a queen, but some places think it’s a king, and thus what they’re seeing is a lot like a monastery to them. So it looks like what you have is this naturally provided analogy for the perfect Christian community. We’re going to ignore the fact that, apparently in the perfect Christian community, there are no women. I’m just going to set that aside and be annoyed about it later.

Anne Brannen  37:09 

Well, you know, I’m not surprised.

Michelle Butler  37:11 

So in some parts of Europe, the understanding of how bee civilization works is that it is this model for the perfect Christian community. So it ends up being used as a model of chastity. Some of the scholars I read wanted to argue that that’s one of the reasons that they use beeswax candles. I don’t buy that argument. I think they use beeswax candles because beeswax candles are the best.

Anne Brannen  37:35 

Yeah, that is exactly it. And it’s still true. I mean, what do we use? What do we use for candles? We don’t use tallow. We use wax. Which are the best ones? Bees.

Michelle Butler  37:46 

They smell good, they don’t drip as much, they’re pretty. So the Baltic is the most important, best wax production area, but the second best is North Africa.

Anne Brannen  37:57 

Really? Oh my goodness.

Michelle Butler  37:59 

But honey was not traded from those areas. The honey produced there was used locally, partially because the honey doesn’t taste as good in the Baltic. They’re doing more of the tree based beekeeping rather than the beehive based beekeeping, and so the pollination is happening with pine, and apparently that doesn’t make for great tasting honey.

Anne Brannen  38:23 

Oh, of course.

Michelle Butler  38:25 

So that’s getting used locally, but it’s not getting traded. The best honey, the high end honey, because one of the points that they’re making is that honey is a local product, but it is also a high end luxury product. They’re well aware that the ecology affects the taste, and so the most desirable honey is lavender.

Anne Brannen  38:48 

Oh, I love that.

Michelle Butler  38:49 

And so they know what they want. And it’s France and Spain that are producing the high end honey, which reminded me, of course, of when we were looking at saffron, because that is also where saffron is coming from. The north of Europe doesn’t end up producing as much honey or wax, because they can only harvest every other year, because they have to leave enough for the bees to not die. It’s so cold. Whereas in the south of Europe and in North Africa, they’re harvesting honey twice a year.

Anne Brannen  39:21 

Right, right, right, right. That makes sense. The reason that this lavender honey is the very, very best is that they are not getting their honey from Florida, where tupelo honey comes from. That’s the best.

Michelle Butler  39:35 

And that actually kind of pops in at the end of the Middle Ages, because once they’re working in the Americas. You know, honey bees aren’t native to the Americas, so one of the things they’re doing is bringing honey bees.

Anne Brannen  39:48 

And then the honey bees find tupelo.

Michelle Butler  39:50 

I’ll circle back to the influence of religion on trade, because it ends up being this kind of delightful win- win. Wax is important for Christian Europe, but Islam is far more interested–Islam and Judaism are much more interested in the honey. Honey is important to religious observance in both Islam and Judaism. One of the things I found really fascinating from their economic work is we assume that sugar pushes out honey as a trading product. But that does not happen, at least not in the Middle Ages–they end up coexisting because they’re being used for different things.

Anne Brannen  40:25 

Oh, okay, okay.

Michelle Butler  40:29 

Even once you have the possibility of having sugar, it doesn’t end up pushing honey out. Because for local use, local honey is cheaper and for high end luxury use, you end up with both. You like honey for some things, you like sugar for some things. Honey also has–there are value added products that honey ends up being traded as. So for example, there’s a cake that you make, almost like a cookie that you make with saffron and honey, and it gets traded too.

Anne Brannen  41:01 

Oh, that sounds good.

Michelle Butler  41:01 

Doesn’t it sound good? I thought it sounded good. We know that monasteries had beehives. They probably produced enough honey for their own use, but absolutely not enough wax. One of the articles I was looking at was reminding us how many products wax was used for. It’s not just candles. Seals are wax and writing tablets that you use for the non permanent stuff. Those are wax tablets. So you use wax for a lot of things. Waxed linen is the equivalent of saran wrap.

Anne Brannen  41:35 

Yes. And in fact, they still use it in Ukraine.

Michelle Butler  41:39 

Oh. Really?

Anne Brannen  41:39 

You can still buy it, waxed cloth. And one of my friends was explaining to me, because I wanted to know about–you remember when our saint ate a snack before he got murdered, and I wanted to know what it was?

Michelle Butler  41:51 

Yeah.

Anne Brannen  41:51 

And I was thinking, maybe it’s cheese and bread, but it was only soft cheese, and I was trying to find a recipe but she said, No, you could just put it in this wax cloth and it’s going to stay just fine. Because the wax warms with your hand and it kind of sticks to each other–that’s why it’s like Saran Wrap.

Michelle Butler  42:09 

Right, right, right.

Anne Brannen  42:10 

Because it could have been just cheese and bread, damn it, yes. Oh, and also, if you want to use less plastic, then this is a very good method.

Michelle Butler  42:17 

That’s actually a really cool idea.

Anne Brannen  42:19 

I know. I’m gonna get some for Laura for Christmas.

Michelle Butler  42:21 

People who were trading from Provence and Catalonia and Portugal–the high end honey–were taking that honey to the Levant, taking it to the Middle East. They were taking honey, but also wool–lots and lots of honey. My God, you wouldn’t believe the records on this. There were ships that had 6000 liters of honey.

Anne Brannen  42:46 

Good lord.

Michelle Butler  42:47 

Just an astonishing amount. It’s a major, major trading product.

Anne Brannen  42:52 

I didn’t know that.

Michelle Butler  42:53 

This high end honey is very desired in the Middle East, and what they’re doing is they’re taking wool and coal and nuts and olive oil and rice and honey, and they’re taking that to the Levant and they’re coming back with spices.

Anne Brannen  43:11 

I just, I don’t know, I think I really assumed that everybody ate their own honey. I had no idea that this trading of honey was going on.

Michelle Butler  43:19 

And the crimes around honey. A lot of are worried about theft, but it’s also forgery.

Anne Brannen  43:26 

Okay, wait.

Michelle Butler  43:28 

I have an actual example of this. In 1459, for example, the parliament in Lisbon fielded complaints from merchants involved in the honey trade, with traders from Oporto claiming that their competitors in Lisbon were fraudulently exporting it to Flanders in pipes bearing the seal of their city.

Anne Brannen  43:49 

Oh, no.

Michelle Butler  43:51 

They did this, the Oporto merchants claimed, because the honey exported from their city was more desirable than that from Lisbon.

Anne Brannen  43:59 

Okay, so it wasn’t like they were faking honey. They were faking where the honey came from.

Michelle Butler  44:04 

Yes. They’re faking the provenance. And that also is like what we saw with the saffron, that there’s attempts to pass off lesser quality saffron as better saffron. So you have the same problem happening with honey. You have merchants trying to pretend like this is really the good stuff when it’s only the second tier stuff. Like everything else, it’s not just that they love it for the taste, it’s a marker of conspicuous consumption, if you have the high end Provence honey. Other crimes associated with it:  watering honey, adulterating it with other things, mixing good quality honey–

Anne Brannen  44:41 

It makes it not antibiotic. It’s going to rot.

Michelle Butler  44:46 

Yeah. Honey will last indefinitely, as long as it’s pure.

Anne Brannen  44:50 

I think we found some from Egypt that’s still just fine

Michelle Butler  44:54 

Because of that antibiotic quality.

Anne Brannen  44:55 

They spent all this time with their little wings getting the water out of the nectar. That’s what they do. And then there isn’t any, so it’s not going to be rotting. It’s brilliant. They have giant brains in those little bodies.

Michelle Butler  45:06 

So adulterating and watering down honey, mixing good quality honey with poor quality honey. This is why you end up with regulations to monitor, track and control the sale of honey. They have no chill about this whatsoever. In Portugal, they are not messing around. I think that’s where you found the one about they chop off your hand. Portugal is really, really serious about because this is such an important trading product for them. Honey based drinks is a whole other thing over there. Some of them are alcoholic, but not all of them. I actually stopped reading about the trade of honey based drinks, because it’s a whole different economy. Here is an astonishing observation, given all of this, from an article from 2021. “Despite its economic and ecological importance, there are currently no studies of monograph length focused on medieval beekeeping.” I kind of hope that these folks eventually do write that book, but they’re absolutely correct. There is no book length study of medieval beekeeping.

Anne Brannen  46:12 

What is the giant book you were telling me about?

Michelle Butler  46:16 

Oh, the giant book. Eva Crane’s giant book is about the entire history of beekeeping forever.

Anne Brannen  46:23 

Oh, right. Okay, so there’s nothing that’s focusing on the Middle Ages.

Michelle Butler  46:27 

Exactly. It is called the World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting. I want that book so badly. By Eva crane, and it is an amazing book. I read a bunch of it. I didn’t end up reading all of it because it is profoundly overwhelming, but it’s awesome. It’s great. This is the book that has the Welsh poem in it. Would you like the Welsh poem?

Anne Brannen  46:52 

Yes, do the Welsh poem.

Michelle Butler  46:54 

I love how annoyed this Welsh poem is. This is from the 15th century, and the author is writing a poem. So first of all, I love that he’s writing his complaint as a poem, like I’m gonna file my grievance as your underling, but I’m gonna do it in verse. So that’s awesome. He is complaining to his overlord about the theft of his honey. “Splendid Scion op Rhys, gentle who breaks spears. I am making a serious complaint ,that you, in spite of the agreement between us, are destroying my bee’s nests. By God, your servants, they are stealing a portion of the honey. By God–” he’s so mad–“by God and Jesus forbid, Llewellyn, the dark man, your servant, the bee hunter, early in the morning, is like a fly searching the trees with his little ax. 100 gallons has been stolen by these locusts.” And it goes on. This only a tiny piece of it. They’re so mad. They’re so mad.

Anne Brannen  48:06 

Thank you.

Michelle Butler  48:09 

Were you gonna or do you want me to tell us about the Anglo Saxon The Swarm?

Anne Brannen  48:13 

Yeah, you do that. You do that. You know how it fits into what you’re saying.

Michelle Butler  48:17 

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised about the amount of bee related poetry that there is, but finding the Welsh bee related poetry that is actually about a crime was awesome. I had already known about the Anglo Saxon charm that is trying to talk them into not swarming and leaving.

Anne Brannen  48:38 

Yeah, because really sometimes they just swarm, even though you didn’t want them to.

Michelle Butler  48:42 

All of the discussions about bees in the Middle Ages are really anxious about the swarming. They’re really, really concerned about this thing that they desperately need and cannot control. So we actually have it in Old English, and then we can have the translation. “Sitte ge, sÄ«gewÄ«f, sÄ«gað tō eorðan, [a]

 næfre ge wilde tō wuda fleogan, beō ge swā gemindige, mÄ«nes gōdes,  swā bið manna gehwilc, metes and ēðeles.” This is awesome. “Settle down, victory women, sink to Earth. Never be wild and fly to the woods. Be as mindful of my welfare as is each man of border and of home.”

Anne Brannen  49:25 

Settle down, women, that’s a good way to talk to bees.

Michelle Butler  49:30 

Sigawif. Victory women. I love it. That’s fabulous. I’m gonna go back over to my notes. I read so much stuff,

Anne Brannen  49:40 

Yeah, and now I want to read more.

Michelle Butler  49:42 

Oh, my God, so much about the economics. 1300 pounds of wax, that is a lot of candles.

Anne Brannen  49:52 

That is really a lot of candles.

Michelle Butler  49:54 

Goodness gracious, there’s so much. I mean, there’s so much folklore associated with it. There’s a bee Museum in Slovenia too, which means we’re up to two bee museums. That’s wild. There’s the ways in which bees are used as a metaphor, as a way of talking about ourselves. So there’s some whole other stuff I didn’t even dig into too far about bees and gender, that one of the ways the Middle Ages is working out its discomfort about gender roles is talking about them in bees is wild. Eva Crane’s Big Bee book is well worth reading, just it’s so dense, it’s like the Silmarillion for bees. There’s discussion in there about the way beehives are talked about in the Doomsday Book, there’s the whole listing of laws and punishments for medieval beehive theft. One of my favorite things I read in there was about the inventory of hives in Sweden. The King of Sweden commanded in 1751 that they inventory all of Sweden to find out how many beehives there were. Now, just to recap, as far as I know, no one has ordered that somebody inventory everything that’s in a library.

Anne Brannen  51:17 

Or even all the people.

Michelle Butler  51:20 

But they’re very important. The beehives are very, very important. No kidding, I am pleased to report that I found some novels that are both about beekeeping and set in the Middle Ages. I wasn’t expecting to find any.

Anne Brannen  51:41 

No, I’m shocked. I’m not surprised that we don’t have opera.

Michelle Butler  51:45 

I was astonished. Brian and I were talking about this. This is definitely one of those, ‘if I had a nickel for every time, I would only have four nickels but still weird that it happened more than once.’

Anne Brannen  51:54 

Yeah. Well, tell us about these novels.

Michelle Butler  51:58 

I have two where bees and beekeeping are present, but peripheral, and three where they’re central. And I want to make sure to mention, just because I mentioned the books, I’m telling you about their existence, I am in no way making a claim about their quality.

Anne Brannen  52:12 

Got it.

Michelle Butler  52:12 

Every single one of these looks super potentially like–I think they’re well intentioned books.

Anne Brannen  52:19 

Bless their hearts.

Michelle Butler  52:21 

I’m not persuaded that they’re fabulous, particularly this first one. This is from 2013. It’s called The Beekeepers, and it is the most earnest, earnest book that looks like it’s probably really boring. It is a time travel book in which a modern bee scientist ends up time traveling after he gets stung by a bee to 12th century Fountains Abbey, and ends up interacting with the beekeeper there, and they’re trying so hard to save the bees. So I think this is a very well intentioned book, but I could not find a single review of it. So caveat emptor. It could be awesome. I don’t know. I didn’t attempt to read all of these. I was trying to read reviews. 2012, A Swarming of Bees is one where they’re peripheral. Beekeeping is peripheral. It’s a murder mystery set in seventh century Whitby Abbey. I did actually find reviews of this that were pretty positive. The 2016 The Beekeepers Daughter is another one where beekeeping is peripheral, but it’s set in medieval Russia, so that’s cool, and it also appears to have been made into a short film. It’s on IMDb. I can’t find anything else about it, except there’s a cast list. I don’t know whether it’s one of these things that was planned…apparently, it’s also pretty sexy. Don’t know. But I think probably the most interesting thing I found in terms of novels was Kristen Gleason’s 2015 In Praise of Bees, and her 2024 The Song of Bees. These springboard from the Irish Legend of Saint Gobnait and her beekeeping.

Anne Brannen  54:06 

Oh, yes.

Michelle Butler  54:08 

It works from the assumption that Saint Gobnait existed and started an abbey. The first one is set in the seventh century, and our main character has been horribly beaten and doesn’t remember who she is, but  is taken to the Abbey and is nursed back to health there. And so beekeeping is present. Beekeeping is even more important in the second one, which is set in the 14th century, but the abbey is still there, and that main character gets actively involved in the beekeeping work at the abbey. I’m so impressed I found books.

Anne Brannen  54:48 

I’m impressed too.

Michelle Butler  54:50 

I am pretty well at the end of what I have. So much about the economics of how it worked. I will give you everything I found, including the very lovely lecture on YouTube that was from the British Academy that was pretty interesting.

Anne Brannen  55:12 

Oh, good, good, good.

Michelle Butler  55:13 

I would definitely recommend that as a starting place, because that’s intended for a general audience. So it’s pretty accessible,

Anne Brannen  55:21 

Well, before we before we leave the topic, I have–this is not medieval, and there are many excellent novels about beekeeping these days. But I want to give a special shout out to a book that’s called Gray Bees in English. It’s Ukrainian, and was published–it was from 2018 by Andrei Kurkov, and it’s been translated into English. Hence me reading it, because I can basically say things like [Ukrainian phrase] and that’s about it. It’s set in the no man’s land, in between the Ukrainian part of the front line and the Russian part of the front line. And our protagonist is living in a town that basically everyone has left except his frenemy, and he’s got his bees, and he has to transport the bees, get through the borders and stuff. It’s a really good novel, and so I want to give a shout out to Gray Bees, even though it is not medieval

Michelle Butler  56:17 

Interesting. I didn’t run across that, but I was trying really hard to stay really focused on trying to find– particularly when the stupid AI kept trying to assure me that such books existed and then they didn’t. It was another one of these places where Google’s AI was hallucinating. It’s not helpful that Google insists on putting the AI results first.

Anne Brannen  56:40 

Oh god. Is a very bad habit that Google got into, and I wish they had not.

Michelle Butler  56:44 

Yeah, it’s very frustrating. It sent me off to go look at a book called Cloister in the Hearth. Like, awesome. Is this book about beekeeping in the Middle Ages in a novel. No, no, it’s not. It’s a historical novel set in the Middle Ages that was from the 1920s and I would have been really excited if bees had been in it. But what’s actually going on is that there’s a character named Bec and every once in a while there is a typo, and he’s called Bee. So that was an hour of my life. I’m never getting back, figuring out that that was why Google was sending me off to go look this up because of a typo. It’s not about bees in the Middle Ages.

Anne Brannen  57:29 

Typo. Well, this has been our discussion of–we had a crime. We had a crime. In fact, there are many crimes. We just, you know, gave you the details on one, but yeah, bees in the Middle Ages, and we really enjoyed the hell out of this, but we’re going to have to do a lot more work on it, just for our own happiness, because we love the bees. We’ll be back, though, and the next time you hear from us, we’re going to be in Greece. We’re going to be in Rhodes in 1522 because that’s when the Ottomans finally threw the Franks off the island. The Siege of Rhodes.

Michelle Butler  58:03 

Interesting. If I was still teaching, the bee crimes would absolutely be coming up. We would be studying bee crimes, because it would absolutely be a place where they would not be expecting there to be quite so many laws about, You can’t steal the bees…

Anne Brannen  58:21 

Whose tree is what, depending on what’s been done to it and where you are at what time.

Michelle Butler  58:25 

We thought there were a lot of laws about what you could wear, which there were.

Anne Brannen  58:30 

Yeah, yeah, no. This. This really goes way beyond.

Michelle Butler  58:34 

The bee crimes are giving the sumptuary laws a run for their money.

Anne Brannen  58:38 

Now this has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. And you can find us on Spotify and Apple podcast, and any place where the podcasts are hanging out, we’re probably pretty much there. And you can find us specifically at truecrime medieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word, and there you can find links to the podcast and the show notes and transcriptions. We get them in as soon as we can, and there’s an index so you can go looking for things if you want to find out when we did talk about, for instance, the great famine, things like that. And you can leave comments and get a hold of us and if you’ve got any medieval crimes that we don’t know about and haven’t shown up in the index, please let us know. They might be on our list, which I think will carry us for–I don’t know some more years, I forget how many, but there’s a lot of crimes, and over in 1000 years, over an entire continent.

Michelle Butler  59:37 

I keep finding more.

Anne Brannen  59:41 

And we keep going over the borders anyway, because sometimes we want to. Yeah, we’ll go to Greece next and throw the Franks off the island. I’m not sorry about that. Bye.

Michelle Butler  59:49 

Bye. Yeah, that sounds fascinating.

112. Sverker the Elder is Murdered, Alebäck Bridge, Sweden, December 25, 1156

Anne Brannen  0:23 

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen. I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:32 

And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:35 

We are in the 12th century. Have we been in the 12th century for about three things now? I think we’ve been stuck in the 12th century for a while.

Michelle Butler  0:42 

It’s a busy time. There are many things happening.

Anne Brannen  0:46 

Much like the 14th. But we are at Christmas, the 25th of December, 1156 near Alvastra priory in Sweden, when King Sverker the elder was murdered by a servant. That’s what we’re doing today.

Michelle Butler  1:00 

On Christmas day. I just need to come back to this.

Anne Brannen  1:03 

We could have used it for our Christmas segment.

Michelle Butler  1:06 

I think we almost need a thing in our index of Christmas crimes that we can just provide as a link to anybody who wants to talk to me about the utter religiosity of the Middle Ages.

Anne Brannen  1:16 

I could do that. I could put the Christmas crimes together. I was thinking, also, I should put the blood feasts together, you know, because, I mean, the index is like, not so…you can find things, you can find things, but it’s not…

Michelle Butler  1:31 

Yet another person murdered on Christmas Day because their guard was down.

Anne Brannen  1:35 

Yep, yep, because it’s Christmas. The worst being that Welsh massacre. In Wales, it was a day where, you know, you did reconciliation. So the English want to reconcile. It’s Christmas. Yes, and then they kill you all at the feast. Anyway, it’s Christmas in 1156 in Sweden. 

Michelle Butler  1:52 

Well, it’s kind of like we’re having Christmas in June. We’re doing, like, half Christmas.

Anne Brannen  1:57 

Okay. It’s our Christmas half. I was going to say, by the way, that I was wondering, what does the word Sweden mean? It comes from a proto European root that means something like mine or ours. So I like that. There’s so many names for people that really mean us, or the people. This is one of them. Anyway, it says Swedes. And before Sweden started to be consolidated, it was comprised of different tribes. Some of them, by the way–this would be the ones called Rus–would go into what’s now Ukraine and found the Kievan Rus. This is where they come from. They’re Swedish. But when it becomes a nation, is debated, because there’s several ways to determine that. But the tribes were more or less divided into two main collections. They were the Geats and the Swedes. The Geats were in the south, and they were landowners and the Swedes were in the north.

Michelle Butler  2:51 

Can we mention that that’s probably the Geats, as in Beowulf, Geats.

Anne Brannen  2:55 

We were about to get to that, yes.

Michelle Butler  2:57 

I’m so sorry.

Anne Brannen  2:59 

Don’t apologize. We are of one mind here. Yes, they are the same ones we know of from Beowulf. But the Swedes are in the north, and they are the sea raiders. Hence the Kievan Rus, because Rus means the rowers. They’re the people that go rowing and come to your house and steal your stuff and, you know, marry your daughters. And the provinces in the kingdom were ruled by kings. The Kingdom of Sweden as a whole existed about 1000 AD but the kingdom still wasn’t fully consolidated. In the 1120s Magnus Nielsen, who was a leader from Denmark–he would later be the king of Denmark, but he wasn’t at this time–claimed the throne of Sweden because his cousin Inge died. Inge was the king of Sweden. It was in a riding accident. By the way, Michelle and I were talking about how many murders there are for several generations, but this was not one. Inga died in a riding accident. Wow.

Michelle Butler  3:56 

Which there also was a whole lot of in the 11th and 12th centuries.

Anne Brannen  4:01 

Yeah. The Geats recognized him as King, but the Swedes didn’t. They elected a different king, Ragnvald, but the Geats murdered him, so Magnus was more or less the king of all Sweden. Then Magnus ended up in a civil war with Denmark because he’d had a rival murdered, and then the rival’s brother went to war with him, and his position in Sweden got kind of shaky, because he was obviously, you know, not around. He was busy in Denmark. So at that point, the Swedes chose Sverker as king, because they had a chance to kind of get things back from Denmark. So they did. He wasn’t from the nobility, although he was very wealthy, but he did have connections to the Stenkil kings that Inge had come from. But the members of the House of Eric also were related to the Stenkil clan, and so those two houses would later follow each other back and forth for about 100 years. The kingdom will just switch. But Sverker was elected King not only by the Swedes, but also by the Geats. So he was actually king of a unified Sweden, mostly. Mostly. There are these various spots around the country that favored Magnus. And there was one that actually brought in the King of Norway, Harald Gille. Gille is Irish. It means servant. This is kind of shorthand for servant of Christ. You see it in a lot of nobility names in Ireland, and obviously here also. But by the 1140s, things were kind of settled down. Okay, so far so good. Let’s just have a little moment more on Sverker. Sverker married well, first by stealing the wife of the King of Denmark. She had been married before that, to the same Inge, King of Sweden that we were talking about before. Then later, after she died, he married Richeza of Poland, who had previously been married to Magnus, the king of some of Sweden, also aforementioned, and he had at least six children between the two of them. Carl, later, is going to be his successor. More on his first son later. He wasn’t a horrible king. The Vastgotta Law, which is the earliest Swedish text in Latin, the oldest of the provincial laws in Sweden, and also which contains a list of Swedish kings, says that he was wise and good. So okay. He supported the church, for instance, which is important in Sweden at this time, because the move from paganism to Christianity was kind of a slow one. It wasn’t as violent as it was in some places, but Christianity took hold, but not immediately. He started working on the first Archbishopric of Sweden, although it’s not really going to get installed until his son Karl is ruler. But in other ways, maybe not so great. It’s at this time that the Swedish fleets attacked merchant boats from Novgorod, thereby starting off the Swedish- Novgorodian wars over who controlled the Gulf of Finland, and those are going to continue even after Novgorod becomes part of Muscovy. They didn’t really stop until the early 1800s. Finland. Everybody wants to fight over Finland. And then, of course, there’s Denmark. Sverker really annoyed the King of Denmark by taking in the king’s rival and co-ruler Canute the fifth after one of their battles.

Michelle Butler  7:22 

Wait, that’s what annoyed him, not the stealing his wife?

Anne Brannen  7:26 

Yes.

Michelle Butler  7:27 

Oh my. Okay.

Anne Brannen  7:29 

There’s going to be more wife stealing in a bit, but that’s going to be very annoying. But any rate, not by Sverker. –his co-ruler, Canute the fifth after one of their battles, because they weren’t amicable co- rulers, and so they kept having battles. Sverker’s son, Johan, according to the Saxo Grammaticus, he was, quote, “a very violent but not very courteous man,” which really is an understatement. He wrote a mean lampoon of Canute, who had run out of money whilst he was staying with Sverker’s court. Then he abducted the wife and stepsister of the governor of Holland, which was at that time part of Denmark–it’s Swedish now–and he raped them sequentially, one day one, one day the other. This went on for a while, and this enraged not just Denmark, but also his father, Sverker, and the general populace. So Johan sent the sisters back, but that didn’t actually fix things. The Danish king started thinking about invading. He’s going to actually invade in a bit, but not yet. What happened to Johan? The local peasantry killed him at a folk meet, you know, because he was.  He was about 20 at that time, he never became king of Sweden, but after they did that, Denmark invaded. So the Danes got ambushed and slaughtered by the local peasantry, and they lost most of their horses to exhaustion and starvation, and they went back to Denmark, although part of them went by way of Smaland, and the local peasantry there held a blood feast, and they invited them to the feast, and they slaughtered them all, which leads me to believe that you do not want to mess with the local peasantry of Sweden. But then Canute and Valdemar, who would later become Valdemar the great, but he wasn’t at this time, they made an alliance with Sverker by an engagement of Canute and Helena, Sverker’s daughter, and then they successfully attacked Sven the third because they were both allies of each other. So they attacked. Now we want to hearken back to one of our very, very first podcasts, might actually have been the second one. Was it the second one, do you think?

Michelle Butler  9:40 

It was early on.

Anne Brannen  9:41 

It was very early. The bloodfeast of Roskilde, because after Canute and Valdemar overthrew Sven, he went into exile, and then he reinvaded Denmark, and then the nobles created a tripartite kingdom. It was one of those, Oh, shut up, will you, for the love of God. So they divided the kingdom up into three and everybody got a part. And Sven held a peace banquet. Oh, yay, we are at peace. And so he invited them, and he tried to slaughter them both, but he only slaughtered Canute. Valdemar got away and fought Svein at the Battle of Gref Heath, at which Svein was defeated. And then he was killed by the local peasantry when his horse got stuck in a bog, leading us to view the local peasantry of Denmark with trepidation as well. In general, I gather, the local peasantry of the Scandinavians is a hell of a thing. Just don’t go to dinner and stay out of the bogs. So much for Denmark. Early on Christmas Day 1156–we now come back to our crime–Sverker was going to Alvastra Priory, which he had founded, by the way, when he was murdered by a trusted servant. That detail is in a papal letter. It’s the Vastgota Law which tells us where he was and why. Saxo Grammaticus tells us that the servant had been got to do this by Magnus Henriksen. He was Danish, but he had a claim to the Swedish throne. Okay, so those are the sources, and those are the things we know. More on that in a minute. I want to give you a couple of other things that you will find mentioned which aren’t in the sources, and so I don’t know about. One is that he was killed by his coachman. That coachman was the trusted servant. This seems doable, since all you have to do is stop the coach, dismount, get into the couch, kill the slightly elderly king. He was in his late 50s, so you know, maybe. But the more exciting legend is that his stable boy did it, and then ran away and boasted to everybody he saw that he had killed the king. So he was captured, and then he was killed by being lowered slowly into a vat of boiling lead, which took over three hours until he died. To which I say bollocks, because one, what was the stable boy doing in or on the coach, because stable boys are in the stable and two, lowering a human into a vat of boiling lead is not going to take three hours. I’m pretty sure about this. I wouldn’t look this up. I just wouldn’t look this up. I put it into Google, and AI got very upset at me and would not answer the question. The AI told me that this was only a matter…the question was entirely about how to torture people and they would not tell me.

Michelle Butler  9:52 

AI is gonna make life difficult for historians and historical novelists in general. They need to just back up. That is very narrow minded. Who’s gonna go Google how to torture somebody? Come on. This is research. Oh, my goodness.

Anne Brannen  11:19 

We can’t replicate this, and we wouldn’t even if we could, but it just simply doesn’t make sense to me. No matter how slowly you lower your victim, there’s going to be shock, there’s going to be blood loss, there’s going to be heart attack. Oh, come on. However–because I did get around Mr. AI the snooty–it’s a slow method of torture death, that shows up in history, and that’s why it’s done. It’s a slow method. I mean, you can just throw people in, but even if you just throw people in, it’s not immediate, unfortunately. Nevertheless, the only time frame that I could find was the poisoner that was condemned to death under Henry the Eighth. You remember this? If you watched the Tudors, you saw this. Jonathan Rhys Myers has you boiled. It took hours. He took two hours to die. He was being repeatedly taken up and then put back in. So he wasn’t just stuck in. So I’m saying no, no, no to the three hour time. So my offer to the legend, because we are not given the details–which trusted servant, we’re not told–I’m going to say, obviously it was a trusted servant who was in the coach already. If the Swedes in the 12th century had valets and man servants, then I think that would go for. But maybe there was some servant in the coach and he killed him. I don’t even know how. Did he stab him? I don’t know. I don’t know. We’re not told. But I’m thinking no to the blabbermouth stable boy. Anyway, he’s dead. What happened after that? Sverker’s son, Carl, was chosen king by part of the Swedes. Eric Jedvardsson ruled over another part, and after killing Sverker, Magnus had Eric killed. Eric was leaving church at that time. Magnus was real big on the killing people around churches stuff.

Michelle Butler  14:27 

Oh my gosh. What a heathen. This is really, really rich for people who in 100 years are gonna be going off on crusade to Finland and forcing them to convert at the point of a sword. Get over yourself already.

Anne Brannen  14:42 

By the way, this particular Eric will become the patron saint of Sweden, along with–by the way, I also upset AI with this–along with Saint Brigitta, the mystic that Marjorie Kemp was all jealous of. You know, the one that Jesus said, You are even bigger than Saint Bridget of Sweden. That’s this one. If you ask Mr. AI the doofus who is Saint Bridget, they say patron saint of Sweden. Who is Saint Eric? Patron saint of Sweden. If you then say, Who’s the patron saint of Sweden? there’s a little pause, and they say both Saint Eric and St Bridget are the patron saints of Sweden. Okay. So you go with that. I just don’t see why. So Magnus, after having killed who would be the future saint Eric–because you can’t be a saint, of course, until you’re dead, and he wasn’t dead until he was killed–Magnus became the king of Sweden. For a year. Sverker’s son, King Carl, killed him in battle. So then Sweden was united again. After that, the Sverker and Eric families, kind of handed the kingdom back and forth, just, you know, sort of violently, until Valdemar became king, being related to all the royal houses in Sweden and Denmark and I think probably Norway. I didn’t see that. I’m just making that up, but I think. It’s not the Valdemar that was came before. This is a different one. There’s some 100 years in there. Then what would happen, Sweden and Norway would unite in 1319 under Magnus Ericsson. Sweden, Norway and Denmark would unite in 1397. Sweden was in a dual monarchy with Poland in 1592, but that didn’t last. Then Sweden became an empire because in the 30 Years War, they gained territory from Russia, Poland, Lithuania, a bunch of the Holy Roman Empire, and by 1648 it was the third largest country in Europe, which I had not realized. Did you realize that, Michelle?

Michelle Butler  16:46 

Wow.

Anne Brannen  16:47 

The Swedish empire. I had never heard of the Swedish empire, British, Roman but no, I haven’t heard of the Swedish empire.

Michelle Butler  16:57 

I did know that they got into it with Russia in the Great Northern War in 1718, and hold their own for a while, until their King Charles gets lured into–like anybody does who attacks Russia in a land war–gets lured into marching–

Anne Brannen  17:16 

Oh, God, no, don’t tell me that they went marching to Moscow in the snow.

Michelle Butler  17:22 

Yes, they did.

Anne Brannen  17:23 

Oh, for the–I had no idea that there was anybody been Napoleon and Hitler.

Michelle Butler  17:27 

Charles was interesting. He was absolutely convinced that God was on his side. So it didn’t matter what dumb, dumb thing he did, he would always win. He eventually dies because he is just hanging out at the top of the castle, leaning over the parapet, checking out the Russian troops, and he gets hit right in the forehead with a musket ball. His advisors had been begging him, get down below. Get down below.

Anne Brannen  17:52 

No, God will save me from–

Michelle Butler  17:54 

I’ll be fine. Nobody’s hit me so far. Boom.

Anne Brannen  17:56 

Boom. Yeah.

Michelle Butler  17:58 

He’s interesting.

Anne Brannen  18:00 

Well, so Sweden. So in 1648, it was the third largest country in Europe, and had a little empire, which we hadn’t known about. But by 1814 it was diminished into what we know, after a series of wars with everybody. They were winning for a while, then not so much. In World Wars one and two, they were officially neutral, but helpful to the Germans. Until the full Russian invasion of Ukraine, they stayed officially out of NATO, but then they joined in 2024. So Sweden no longer neutral, still at odds with Russia. Oh, well, there you go. Michelle. This was an interesting one, wasn’t it? Because we didn’t have an enormous amount of sources. I understand that you found some interesting things, however.

Michelle Butler  18:48 

So here is what I found. I have a Sverker adjacent set of novels and movies, and I’m including it because it is wildly popular, both in Swedish and in English.

Anne Brannen  19:04 

Oh, good. We can find it.

Michelle Butler  19:06 

Yes. The first book is published in 1998. It is by Jan Guillou, who is an author of French, actually Breton, and Swedish ancestry, and he is this whole other Ian Fleming wildness. It’s worth taking a look at his Wikipedia page, but that was a little far afield. The author is his own spectacular rabbit hole. He spends time as a journalist. He gets in trouble with the CIA. Oh my gosh. He’s a whole bag of chips on his own. But the important thing for this is this set of three, and then there’s kind of a tag on one, so it’s four books set in the second half of the 12th century in Sweden, kind of. Because they’re about a knight named Arn, who becomes a Knight Templar, and so that gives the books a reason to be all over Europe and back. But Arn does interact with Carl, Sverker’s son. The books are hugely popular, translated in English, blah, blah, blah, and then they are adapted into two Swedish movies.

Anne Brannen  20:24 

Oh, cool.

Michelle Butler  20:25 

The first in 2007 called Arn the Knight Templar, and the second in 2008.  Then it is made into an extended TV series, a whole different adaptation, first broadcast in 2010. Those movies–one of the reasons I wanted to be sure to mention them, is that they are the most expensive Swedish movie project ever.

Anne Brannen  20:51 

Oh, really?

Michelle Butler  20:52 

They spent money on this. I did include a trailer for them.

Anne Brannen  20:58 

Clearly, they’re available with English subtitles.

Michelle Butler  21:01 

The trailer that I found was in English. The two movies were released in Sweden, in Swedish, and then they were cut down into a single version, which then has English. So it’s released with English dialog as a single movie. From the trailer, it looked to me to be not amazing, but not terrible either. So we’re not in Braveheart territory.

Anne Brannen  21:34 

We don’t have to make fun of it for the rest of our lives.

Michelle Butler  21:37 

Yeah, no, we’re not in Braveheart or Robin Hood Prince of Thieves territory. We’re more like in Kingdom of Heaven or The Last Duel territory. It’s not groundbreaking, but it’s also not terrible, and will probably not make you throw things at the screen. Or at least not too many. But the really, really cool stuff that I found is about the tourism. Yay.

Anne Brannen  22:03 

Yay. The tourism.

Michelle Butler  22:05 

I was very excited to find this. Sverker built the first royal castle in Sweden.

Anne Brannen  22:13 

I didn’t know that.

Michelle Butler  22:14 

Obviously there were seats of government before.

Anne Brannen  22:17 

We’re talking about ones that could sort of last for a long time.

Michelle Butler  22:21 

Yeah, yeah. Stone built royal castle. This is on an island in a large lake in southern Sweden. It’s Lake Vattern, and the island is Visingso. This island has been inhabited at least since the Stone Age, but it becomes a center of royal power in the 12th century. It is Sverker who brings the royal court there. When you look at the geography of it, it’s plain why it’s a good choice. It’s extremely defensible. You have the whole lake to be your moat.

Anne Brannen  22:55 

Oh, cool.

Michelle Butler  22:56 

You can’t get there except by boat. It’s not a tiny little lake that you can slap a bridge over. Even now, the only way to get there is by boat. They run ferries for the tourists, but there’s not a bridge and there’s not a causeway because the lake’s too deep. It is boat relevant. And so, of course, this is–if I was the compromise candidate in this time period, I think I would agree that this is an excellent place to allow yourself to sleep, assuming nobody has paid off your valet.

Anne Brannen  23:27 

Yes, yes. Or stable boy or coachman, yes.

Michelle Butler  23:31 

So he lives there. It’s the seat of government for four Swedish kings after him. He didn’t die there, but four Swedish kings die here, including his son, Carl. This was crime, plus about half a dozen bonus crimes that just came up as part of the research.

Anne Brannen  23:48 

Yeah, we have a lot more on our list now, which is, I think, very funny, because, as we were noting to each other, this is the first time we’ve been to Sweden. Aha, we were missing a lot, weren’t we.

Michelle Butler  23:59 

They are no more better behaved than anybody else in the Middle Ages. Who would have guessed? So this castle is called Nas–NAS–castle. It is at the very, very bottom of the island, it’s hanging off the end of the island. So I suspect that what it’s doing is making sure that people can watch to make sure that–you stick a guy up there in the absolute top tower and tell him to watch for any boats coming over. 

Anne Brannen  24:28 

The crow’s nest.

Michelle Butler  24:29 

Yes, exactly. Do not pay any attention to the skeptical people on TripAdvisor who are like [sniff] not much left here. Well, yes, it’s 1000 years old.

Anne Brannen  24:40 

Okay, okay. But is there a tea room?

Michelle Butler  24:43 

No, these are ruins.

Anne Brannen  24:46 

Oh, okay, no, you can’t have tea rooms at ruins. Well, you can do it at Bury St Edmunds, you just have to build them separately from the ruins.

Michelle Butler  24:52 

It wasn’t a humongous castle to begin with. This is clearly an early stab at it. It’s used for roughly 200 years, but it gets burnt down in a conflict in the 14th century and then not rebuilt. So you also certainly are going to have people filching stones from it. The idea that the people who live there are going to just leave the giant pile of prequarried stones is not a thing that typically happens.

Anne Brannen  25:21 

No, you need them.

Michelle Butler  25:22 

Usually, people come and recycle them and build something else with them. Stockholm is founded in 1250, thereabouts, and royal administration moves there and stays there. The Tre Kronor Castle, Three Crowns Castle, is built around that time and remains the seat of royal power. The current governmental palace is on the site of the Tre Kronor Castle. Most unfortunately it burnt in 1697, and took the National Library and the Royal Archives with it.

Anne Brannen  26:01 

Good God.

Michelle Butler  26:02 

Which makes researching Sweden’s history especially challenging because a whole bunch of sources had been ever so conveniently pulled together and then were lost. There are the ruins of another castle on the same island. So you might find this if you go googling about tourism on Visingo, but that’s a 16th century–I mean, it’s interesting, but it’s not a 12th century castle. It’s 400 years later, and it’s not a royal seat, it’s a fancy residence of an aristocrat. It’s kind of like a country home at this point. It’s not even their primary home. It’s, we go here when we need to get away from the pressures of the capital.

Anne Brannen  26:43 

Well, do they have a tea room?

Michelle Butler  26:46 

Alas, this is also just ruins, but tourism is a really, really important industry on the island, so I’m sure there is a tea room somewhere.

Anne Brannen  26:57 

There’s going to be a tea room. Okay. Thank you. With those little Scandinavian pastries that have the almond paste in them.

Michelle Butler  27:04 

Mmm. Yeah. This castle was used to house Russian prisoners during the Great Northern War, and it’s likely that an escape attempt by them is what led to it–now we’re up to three castles–burning down.

Anne Brannen  27:21 

Whoa.

Michelle Butler  27:21 

In 1718. So all three castles I have for today burnt down.

Anne Brannen  27:29 

Oh, well.

Michelle Butler  27:32 

So that’s why it’s not in great shape. But that might possibly have to do with the Russian prisoners of war trying to escape.

Anne Brannen  27:40 

They burnt the castle down so they could get out?

Michelle Butler  27:43 

I don’t know that they set it on fire on purpose, and that’s more of a rumor than a fact, but it is known for sure that it burnt down in 1718, and also that it was being used as a prison for the Russian soldiers. It was not rebuilt after that, so it can also be visited as a ruin. Of course, there’s the memorial stone at the site of where Sverker was murdered.

Anne Brannen  28:11 

It’s really tasteful. Yeah, I’ve got a picture of it. We’ll use it for our picture.

Michelle Butler  28:18 

I’m a little bit surprised that there isn’t more historical fiction from this time period, because it really feels very dramatic. I think it’s likely that, at the moment, the slightly earlier Viking history is sucking up all the historical fiction oxygen. I found tons and tons and tons of Viking historical fiction, ranging all the way from the seventh century to the 10th century. So there’s lots and lots and lots there, but this is just a little bit later and has not yet gotten, as far as I can tell, the attention that this bloodthirsty drama deserves.

Anne Brannen  9:52 

Yeah, yeah. Seems to me you could put one of those, like several volume sets together, all about murdered Swedish kings in this era. Yeah, I think you could do a lot.

Michelle Butler  29:11 

I ran across a book this week about early medieval Swedish queens, and at least a couple of them need to go on our list too, because they were no more better behaved.

Anne Brannen  29:21 

They’re poisoning people?

Michelle Butler  29:23 

So bad.

Anne Brannen  29:26 

Shooting their dads with crossbows? Nah she wins. She wins the prize.

Michelle Butler  29:35 

Would you believe that as I was doing the research for this, I ran across another novel, an entirely different one about Agnes. Remember last time we were talking about the Massacre of the Latins, and I was telling you that there was a novel about Agnes of France. I found a whole different one. A whole different one. So I missed one, but now I can report you that there are two novels about Agnes of France, and this one’s in English.

Anne Brannen  30:05 

Things come into fashion, and there’ll be these figures that have all this historical fiction written around them, and others that have just been completely bypassed, whose stories are just as interesting.

Michelle Butler  30:14 

Vikings became very big about 10 years ago, and all of a sudden they were everywhere.

Anne Brannen  30:18 

They were everywhere.

Michelle Butler  30:19 

Which I’m entirely here for.

Anne Brannen  30:22 

I’m okay with that, but I do wish that there were other things also.

Michelle Butler  30:25 

This is a very dramatic time. This could easily support a Game of Thrones type series, as long as you don’t get too attached to anybody. I mean, really, you have to just go into it knowing don’t get attached. But that is pretty well all I got.

Anne Brannen  30:41 

Well, that’s our sojourn in Sweden, kind of at the beginning of the Sverker-Eric battles, which will last for quite some time, with our lovely King of Sweden murdered on Christmas Day. The next time you hear from us, we are going to be totally not in the same time period, and not real close either. We’re going to be in Ireland in 649, because the king of Ireland was killed after he annoyed his peasants. More peasants, more more peasantry. I tell you. I tell you, this is serious.

Michelle Butler  31:15 

Definitely not to get on the wrong side of the peasants.

Anne Brannen  31:20 

Yes. I hate to think that, because really, naturally, I have much more fear of the wealthy than the not wealthy. But really, we have had a lot of murderous peasants in this particular–

Michelle Butler  31:33 

Sometime you just push people too far.

Anne Brannen  31:36 

Sometimes you do. When I told my wife that we were going to be talking about a king of Sweden that was killed by one of his servants, she said immediately, well, what had he been doing? Because really, her assumption was he’d been completely mistreating the peasants. But no, in this case, not.

Michelle Butler  31:54 

I wouldn’t be as appalled by that. If he had done something, been been horribly behaved. It had been the other dude, the older son, sure go for it.

Anne Brannen  32:05 

Oh, well, he did get murdered by the peasants, and that I’m okay with actually. I mean, really getting him out of the realm of the living seems to me to be sort of useful, because he wasn’t even 20 yet and he’d already been that badly behaved. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. You can find us on Spotify and Apple podcast and all the other places where the podcasts are hanging out. You can find us at truecrime medieval.com, True Crime Medieval is all one word. There you can find links to the podcast and links to the show notes and links to the transcriptions. There’s an index so that you can go looking for things, if you want to, for instance, find the Blood Feast of Roskilde. It’s there in there. You can leave us comments, and we’d love to hear if you’ve got any medieval crimes that you think we ought to look at. You can see if in the index, if we’ve done them yet; if we haven’t done them, we’ll probably put them on our list, which Michelle tells me is going to take us at least through the next two years, or until we die. You told me it was going to take us through till we die.

Michelle Butler  33:10 

It looks to me like we could do this for the next 20 years, and we’re not going to run out of people being appalling in the Middle Ages, apparently, usually on Christmas Day. Honestly, you’d get to the point where somebody invites you over, like, Hmm, oh no, that’s a good idea. At least my relatives were just usually annoying, rather than murderous.

Anne Brannen  33:32 

Mostly, we’ve been dealing with many of my relatives, and they’re all terrible, my horrible ancestors. Anyway, that’s us. Bye.

Michelle Butler  33:44 

Bye. 

111. Massacre of the Latins, Constantinople, Byzantine Empire, April 1182

Anne Brannen  0:23 

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I’m your host in Albequerque.

Michelle Butler  0:32 

And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:35 

Today we are in Constantinople in 1182. We have a podcast on the Siege of Constantinople, which happens after this. They’re connected, but it happens after this. The Massacre of the Latins was in 1182, and rather than the Western Christians coming and sacking the Eastern Christian city of Constantinople, this is the Eastern Christians within the city of Constantinople sacking the Latin Quarter. So I will explain. In 1182, the Italian populace of Constantinople was decimated, massacred, or taken into slavery by mobs of Greek Eastern Christians. And this would lead to the relationship between the eastern and western sides of the Christian Church, which had already been–after the Great Schism of the 11th century, the relationship had been getting worse steadily for some time. So Constantinople. Constantinople, which has been Istanbul since 1930–I’m gonna get to that later–and was Byzantium before 324, was an ancient city. It was a Greek city founded in the seventh century BCE, a trading city, being at the only way to get by water into the Black Sea from the Aegean Sea. Once you’re in there, you can go east into what’s now Russia, or west into what’s now Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria. So really important trade routes, and because it was at the water opening between the two seas, it was also easy to defend, because it was really narrow land. Its defensibility and its prime trade and travel location led to Its being founded again, after it was Byzantium, as Nova Roma, by Constantine the first who intended to build, as the name suggests, a New Rome. So that was 324 and soon after that, it became the capital of the Roman Empire, the East and West being, at that moment unified. Fair enough. But in 330 it was renamed Constantinople after the founder, the founder of it in that particular incarnation–it had had several already. The Roman Empire, as you know, was vast. It wasn’t as vast as the Mongolian empire would be later–we had a recent podcast in which we mentioned that–and it was governed in two pieces from 395 on. It wasn’t a split. It was just being governed in two pieces. At that point, Constantinople was the capital of the eastern part of the Empire, and Rome was the capital of the western part. On the western side, Rome would be captured by a Germanic Federation in 476, thereby beginning the Middle Ages. Though they didn’t know it then. They did not know that they had hit the Middle Ages, but they did, as we know, because we have Gibbon. On the eastern side, Constantinople remained the biggest European city and the wealthiest, and it had a university long before the West had universities, the University of Constantinople being founded in the fifth century. It contained, by the way–this is one of my side notes. It contained part of the Alexandrian library, which did get burnt down by the Romans and then also by the Arab army under Caliph Umar. But although it’d been burnt down and the books had been destroyed. many of the scrolls survived. We think that actually a large part of the Alexandrian library was held at the University of Constantinople and the  Gondishapur Academy in Persia and the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. So they got salted elsewhere. Probably still exist in many places, although not the University of Constantinople. Sorry about that. The other two I don’t know about. The city also had innumerable pieces of outstanding architecture in which you can still see in what survives the blending of western and eastern influences. It’s really great if you’re studying art and architecture. Constantinople is wonderful. And being the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, it was also the capital of the Eastern Christian church. So the Patriarch of Constantinople, he’s the successor not of Peter, but of Andrew the apostle. The Patriarch of Constantinople was the spiritual leader of the Eastern Orthodox Christians. And still is. Here’s just another side note. One of the differences between the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Church is that the Patriarch of Constantinople, he’s the Archbishop of Constantinople, and is the first among equals of the bishops of the church across the world. He presides over equals, but he’s got no authority over churches outside of his own bishopric. It’s not the kind of hierarchy that the Western Church has, where the Pope, although being elected from amongst the bishops, is the leader of all of them. As mentioned before, Constantinople could be easily defended. It had extraordinarily good defenses, and for nearly 1000 years it kept being besieged over and over, but it never fell until later–that would be the Siege of Constantinople. And so I’ll get to that later. During the time in between this early part of Constantinople history and our crimes that we’re talking about today, the city underwent sieges and plagues, religious controversies, and there were rulers of Constantinople of various sorts of competence. But in 1081, Alexios Komnenos became the emperor. He stabilized the empire, and Constantinople entered this prosperous period. The population rose, trade increased, there was wealth galore. There was more art, there were more buildings, and it was just, it was sweet. It was great. Michelle got really excited about Alexios. Are you talking about Alexios later? Are we just going to try and find a crime in his era so that we can talk about him?

Michelle Butler  6:32 

I was not going to try to shoehorn him into this one.

Anne Brannen  6:36 

Okay, we won’t shoehorn him. We are totally going to find something that happens.

Michelle Butler  6:39 

But I definitely, definitely need there to be a crime, so we can talk about the awesomeness that is Alexios and the possibly even more awesomeness that is his daughter, Anna.

Anne Brannen  6:49 

Yes his daughter is definitely somebody to talk about. So we’re going to see if we can do that, but we move on. That was a great period. Constantinople, yay. As a major and wealthy center, Constantinople attracted traders, and by the time of our crime, which is 1182, the sea trade and the city’s finances were dominated by the Latins, that being the Roman Catholics from Italy, and in particular, Venice, Genoa, Pisa, and Amalfi. Alexios I had given the Venetians some major trading concessions, and the Venetians, in taking over the sea trade, caused the Byzantine Navy to become weaker and weaker. Venice also kind of shouldered out the other sea traders. So Manuel the first Komnenos, who’s the grandson of our Alexios that we want to talk about later but not this particular week, gave Pisa, Genoa, and Amalfi trading concessions so as to lessen the Venetian stranglehold of sea trade and sea power. All four of the Italian cities created their own living and trading spaces over by the Golden Horn. The Golden Horn is where is the estuary that lies in between the center of Constantinople–Byzantium, the old center, from new Istanbul. So they’re a little away from what was the city center. Now, what happened when the Latins became the major traders in Constantinople? There’s some ripple effect, which was that they became a near monopoly. Smaller traders, especially traders native to Constantinople, were pushed out, and the Latin traders got wealthier and wealthier, and they amassed not just wealth, but also land. Also they were disliked because apparently they were really, really snooty, I’m sorry to tell you. There wasn’t any reason to like them. It wasn’t like they got all your money and then they were nice about it. No, no. The rich citizens of Constantinople also got wealthier and wealthier, being attached to the whole trading thing, and they were able to hold their own, but the poor and the smaller traders, not so much. Also, there was this legitimate fear amongst the people of the Eastern Church that there would be a takeover by the Western Church. That wasn’t something that was just sort of made up in paranoid heads. It really was an issue. It really was a thing to be concerned about. Anyway, so the Latins were hated, hated, hated, hated, I tell you, by the local citizens. Also, there’s more to this. The Latins were, from the point of view of the Eastern Church, heretics. Also, they were totally out of control. They might have all been Italian, but that didn’t mean that they were some kind of unified group. They weren’t a unified group in Italy. They were fighting all the time in Italy, and they sort of continued that as they went on into Constantinople. They were at war with each other. Constantly. The Pisans raided the Genoese and the Venetians attacked the Genoese also, and at that point there was an attempted house arrest of all the Venetians. But that didn’t go very well, because they went out to sea instead, and they made an alliance with Sicily, which was a Norman realm at that time, being ruled by the Vikings from France. It was Manuel I Komnenos, who had given the Italians all of the trading concessions. They’d given more and more trading concessions. After he died, Maria of Antioch, who was his widow, was Regent because her child was young, not a not a baby, but, you know, a child. That’s important for something that comes later. She also favored the Latins and the wealthy. In April of 1182, Andronicos the I Komnenos, who was Manuel’s cousin, took the city and the populace was, when he came in, exceedingly happy. They were so glad to see him, so glad that there were joyous, joyous celebrations, which then morphed into a mob attacking the Latins. The massacre was encouraged by the Byzantine clergy, I’m sorry to tell you, and also Andronikos, who actually hadn’t minded the Latins. What, was he enjoying it? I don’t know. He becomes kind of worse and worse over his lifetime. He had actually sent soldiers ahead of him to kind of help whip the mob up so that he could move the festivities into slaughter. There were, as estimated by Eustathius of Thessalonica, 60,000 Latins, and nearly all of those were murdered, from Pisa and Genoa especially. Some did escape by sea, and they then went and they burned some Byzantine monasteries that were on the coast, and about 4000 of them were not massacred, but were sold into slavery to the Turks. Cardinal John, who was the papal legate to Constantinople, was murdered and decapitated, and his head was tied to the tail of a dog and then dragged around the streets. Women and girls were raped. Women and children slaughtered. Latin corpses were dug out of graves and abused, and the churches were desecrated, and the priests were tortured and murdered. The Latins, who were in the hospital because they were sick, they all got stabbed to death. Andronikos forced Maria’s son–remember he’s old enough to write–to sign the order for her execution. She was strangled and buried in some unknown place. Naturally, then relations between the Byzantine and the Roman churches worsened. Trade actually picked up again because money, you know, you don’t want to get rid of that. So the trade agreements got resurrected after the massacre. But things were not good. A few years later, in 1185, William of Sicily–remember, he’s one of the Normans–besieged Thessalonica. He breached the eastern wall by digging under it, and then proceeded to kill the defenders and massacre the citizens. Eustathius of Thessalonica was actually there, and he survived, obviously, because he was able to write down. He wrote a chronicle about the event, and he estimated seven to eight thousand dead, so less than had died in Constantinople. William had invaded the eastern empire. Why? Why William of Cecily? Why did you do this? Alexios Komnenos, who was a great nephew of Manuel Andronikos’s cousin–you remember, all these people are related–had requested his aid in overthrowing Andronikos. Andronikos was able to fend off William’s invasion, and the citizens of Constantinople, who had, as you remember, been so happy when Andronikos took over the city that they had to go slaughter people, turned on the Emperor. There was an uprising, and Isaiah Angelos, who was related–only kind of distantly, but related–became the emperor, and Andronikos was tortured and brutally executed. You know, like, there’s some bad deaths in history. This is one of the worst. I’m not going to go into the details. You can look it up. His body was left in the Hippodrome, unburied. It was there for some years, hanging, I think, between the two pillars that he had been hung between while some things were going on. Later on, Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, and his son, Henry the sixth, threatened to attack Constantinople, but they didn’t actually. But the culmination of all this was the Sack of Constantinople in 1204, when the Venetians, who were in the Fourth Crusade, were supposed to be going to Jerusalem, but they went to Constantinople because they were making this deal by which they were gonna get some funding so that they could go to Jerusalem, because they had this whole money thing worked out, only it didn’t. So they were in league with one of the Angeloses who was, you know, related to Isaiah, to get Isaac back on the throne, because he’d been taken off. Some of the Crusaders in the Fourth Crusade left the crusade at that point entirely because they did not want to be involved in killing other Christians. They might have been schismatics or heretics, but they were indeed Christians. And the bulk of that crusade under the Venetians sacked Constantinople. Much of the population was killed and the property looted. Medieval, Greco-Roman works of art were stolen. It was amazing how much stuff the Venetians brought back. Like, just for instance, the horses that are in front of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice were taken from the Hippodrome. You know, lots of stuff that you see in Italy was in Constantinople before it got to Italy. Orthodox clergy were murdered. The Hagia Sophia especially was attacked and looted and desecrated and besides affecting trading and political relations, the sack of Constantinople divided the two halves of the church almost irrevocably. There have been attempts to reconcile theological differences, but not much headway has actually been made, although things are not as violent as they were, obviously. And the Roman Pope, did–I forget which one–but a recent one did apologize to to the Eastern Church for the sack of Constantinople. I don’t know if there has been an apology about the massacre of the Latins. Michelle, do you know? Has there have been an apology about the massacre of the Latins?

Anne Brannen  6:49 

I did not run into anything that suggests that. We talked about this when we talked about the sack of Constantinople, but one of the pieces of information I find really useful about the sack of Constantinople is a comparison of the size of the city. Constantinople, at this point, was a city of 250,000 people. In 1204. It was a city of sophistication and wealth the likes of which the Western Europeans could not conceive of. For an interesting comparison, in the 14th century, so a good 150 years later, before the Black Death, so at a at a population height, rather than a dip, the City of London was 40,000.

Anne Brannen  7:48 

And it was big. It was the biggest in England.

Anne Brannen  7:52 

Yes, yes. It was one of the biggest cities in Western Europe. Constantinople is just an order of magnitude more in every sense. Nothing justifies the sack, but you can kind of understand why they were mad. Anyway, it was just irresistible.

Anne Brannen  12:03 

It was. There was so much stuff there, and it was so gorgeous. Michelle and I were talking before we started recording about once the humans were on the planet, there was no way that that the piece of land that Constantinople was on would not become of major, major, major importance, because it’s in between–it’s just right there, at the nexus of trade routes and continents and easily defensible until the sack of Constantinople. But we talk about that in our podcast, where we explain how it is that the Westerners took Constantinople. Anyway, after the siege of Constantinople, the city declined, not surprisingly, and eventually it was captured by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, so this is all what happens later. Mehmed the second had given orders when they took Constantinople not to pillage Hagia Sophia. The custom was that the soldiers got three days to pillage, but they were not allowed to pillage Hagia Sophia. But even though they had left Hagia Sophia alone, it was actually in sort of bad shape already. Mehmed the second had it transformed into a Muslim mosque, so it got cleaned up and refurbished and made into a mosque. That’s why, if you’re looking at pictures of Hagia Sophia, there’s the minarets. It looks much like a mosque because that’s when they put the minarets in, and the patriarch–that would be the Bishop of Constantinople–moved to the Church of the Holy Apostles. So that’s the seat of the Bishop of Constantinople now. Mehmed also gave orders that Muslims, Christians and Jews were to resettle the city. He wanted that diversity, so prisoners of war and deportees were sent there. You can get a lot of variety that way. Centuries later–I jump centuries later–the Ottoman Empire was partitioned at the end of World War Two, because they were on the losing side. So that was 1920. In 1922 the Republic of Turkey took over from the Sultanate, and Ankara became the capital. Constantinople had been called Istanbul by the Turkish people since the conquest of 1453, and so it had both names, just kind of colloquially both. But in 1930 it was officially changed. Both names had been used for centuries, but the Turkish Post Office wanted the matter cleaned up, damn it. You know, you got to have, what’s the name of the damn city? Because we got to get mail there. So with contemporary usage, that name got established. So the massacre of the Latins was one of the more horrific of the East-West schism markers. It wasn’t as remembered as the Fourth Crusade, the siege of Constantinople. That’s the one, really, that you hear about. But arguably, I mean, there’s ways in which it was worse. The loss of human life was much greater in the massacre of the Latins than it was in the siege of Constantinople. But in terms of major theft and destruction and political ramifications, the siege of Constantinople was much more important.

Michelle Butler  14:23 

It is annoyingly not well covered.

Anne Brannen  14:23 

Yeah, amazingly.

Michelle Butler  11:42 

I got a pile here of 8 books, some of which I checked out from the library, and a couple of which I couldn’t get from the library, so I was forced to acquire used copies of them. Among the eight books, there might possibly be four pages.

Anne Brannen  14:23 

Yeah, I don’t actually understand this, because it was a crucial part of the move into the siege of Constantinople. Because it wasn’t just that the Venetians wanted some money. The Venetians really did like their money and their fancy art. It was also that the feeling in the West against the Byzantines of Constantinople was very strong and had been growing, but the massacre of the Latins really contributed heavily to that. So they’re both major incidents in the history of the Schism. But you, Michelle, you told me that you were very happy with stuff you found, although I don’t think there was an opera was there.

Michelle Butler  21:39 

I don’t think there was an opera, although it’s kind of funny that when I Googled–I was gonna tell you about this. Google is pushing its AI summaries of things. You have to be careful, because it often tells you lies. And in fact, during the course of researching this, it was very frequently trying to tell me lies. I would search, for example, to try to find a historical novel. And it would swear to me, up, down and sideways, that this book by this name is a historical novel about the person you asked about, and it wasn’t.

Anne Brannen  22:16 

You don’t want to ask it questions about medieval drama either, believe me.

Michelle Butler  22:20 

But when I searched for Andronicus Komnenus opera, what the AI says is, well, there doesn’t appear to be one, but here’s what it says, ‘the concept of an Andronicus Komnenus opera is plausible.’ And then it pulls out some possible operatic themes. This cracks me up mightily, that Google’s AI was like, Yeah, I agree, that would make an amazing opera.

Anne Brannen  22:52 

‘Why don’t you write that?’

Michelle Butler  22:54 

Let me tell you some things that could be in it, and then it lists some possible operatic themes–power, ambition and tyranny, love and intimacy, political intrigue, betrayal. And then it, just because, I don’t know why, because it’s become self aware, and it’s like, for the love of God, somebody write this. Then it suggests possible characters and situations. Andronicus, his wives, nieces and mistresses, nobles and generals, foreign powers. In summary–I’m quoting now directly–“in summary, while a specific Andronicus Komnenus opera may not exist, the historical figure and his reign offer a rich source of material for operatic composition. The stories, themes of power, intrigue and cultural classes could lend themselves to various operatic styles and scenarios.” So even Google’s AI thinks this would make an amazing opera. Why doesn’t this already exist?

Anne Brannen  24:02 

It totally would, wouldn’t it? It just totally would.

Michelle Butler  24:05 

Why isn’t there an opera about this?

Anne Brannen  24:11 

Well, what did you find other than the hilariousness of AI?

Michelle Butler  24:15 

Wanting to basically outline an opera about Andronicus. I need to take a screenshot. I will have to try to figure out how to take a screenshot of what it came up with so that I can share this with you.

Anne Brannen  24:27 

It’s hilarious. We need to put it in the notes.

Michelle Butler  24:29 

AI making suggestions to us. I have two things. I have the William of Tyre Historia, which is important because it’s one of the primary sources for the massacre–

Anne Brannen  24:43 

Where did his information come from?

Michelle Butler  24:46 

He was born in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Anne Brannen  24:51 

Oh, right, right, right. That’s why he’s William of Tyre. Okay, got it.

Michelle Butler  24:55 

Around 1130, so he is one of that first generation of children born to the people who came to populate the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. His parents were probably merchants. They were almost certainly merchants, probably from France or Italy. They were probably well to do merchants, because he ends up being really well educated and ends up being an archbishop, which doesn’t happen to you if your parents are the people sowing rye.

Anne Brannen  25:31 

Very, very seldom. Yeah, it has happened, but very, very seldom.

Michelle Butler  25:35 

And his brother, Ralph, was a burgess, a leader of the merchant community. So they’re not nobles, but they’re well to do merchants. He was educated as a child in Jerusalem in the Cathedral School at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and then around 1145 he went to study canon law and Liberal Arts in Paris, Orlean, and Bologna. Those universities are just on the cusp of emerging, they are centers of education where you have well known teachers. He actually lists in the Historia a bunch of his professors, which isn’t really relevant to our current discussion, but he does list who he studied with. And then, you know, in another generation, those centers of education emerge and become the University of Paris, the University of Bologna, and then, as we know from looking at that time period, it’s all downhill from there. Because within five years of the universities getting organized, people are complaining and moaning about how it was so much better back in the old days.

Anne Brannen  25:35 

Yeah. Yeah. Young people, what the hell? What are they doing?

Michelle Butler  26:21 

He returned to Jerusalem in 1165, and so now he is really well situated to rise in both government and the church very quickly, because he is native to Jerusalem. He’s born there. He’s really familiar with it, but he is educated in the soon to be universities of Europe. He’s barely back in the city before King Amalric appoints him as ambassador to the Byzantine Empire, which is one of the reasons he has these contacts to then report back about the massacre of Latins.

Anne Brannen  27:21 

That is a great position.

Michelle Butler  27:22 

So he becomes ambassador to the Byzantine Empire, and he becomes tutor to Amalric’s son, Baldwin. There’s an interesting sidebar about Baldwin. William is who discovered that Baldwin had leprosy, or at least that’s the story William tells. And I don’t see any reason why William would–I mean, what possible motivation is there to be the person to put your hand up and say, I discovered the Crown Prince has leprosy?

Anne Brannen  27:50 

No, this is probably true.

Michelle Butler  27:52 

It makes sense that he would be the one to notice this. He’s his teacher. He’s with him all the time. And the story that he tells is he observes Baldwin playing a game of chicken, basically, with the other boys, and what they’re trying to do is scratch and pinch each other’s arms until the other boy says, uncle and gives up. And Baldwin always wins, because he’s not feeling the pain. In fact, he’s not even acting like it’s hard, and William’s like, Uh oh, that’s not normal, which is what causes him to look more closely and realize that Baldwin is showing signs of leprosy. Baldwin, of course, is famous as the leper King of Jerusalem. I think everybody’s probably heard of Baldwin. Anybody who’s looked into the crusading times at all would be would be familiar with Baldwin. Around 1170 William is commissioned by Amalric to write a history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Crusader kingdom, obviously. William works on that history almost until the end of his life, in 1184, and there’s reason to believe that he stops not because he’s done, but because he’s tired, because he dies in 1186 and the last chapter of it does not appear to be finished, so it’s either been lost or he just is like, ‘I can’t, I can’t do it anymore, guys.’

Anne Brannen  29:09 

I like William of Tyre. I’d like to think that he just kind of stopped because he–like Beth in Little Women, you know, the pen becomes too heavy for his hand.

Michelle Butler  29:18 

So William’s history is really important because it is the only source for the 12th century Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem that is written by a native of the city, which means he has great knowledge of the city. He has great connections for getting the information. One of the sources of information about what’s happening in Byzantium, once Andronicus seizes power, once things start going south–you know, Manuel dies, and now you’ve got Maria of Antioch, and everybody hates her. And things aren’t going great with Alexios, because he’s a kid. There are people who sense that things are going badly, and so they flee, and they come to Jerusalem, they go to Sicily, which is one of the reasons that William ends up invading, because he has a bunch of people telling him things aren’t great. There’s an opportunity–which, we all know, the Normans, they can’t pass up an opportunity.

Anne Brannen  30:14 

No, the Normans are on it.

Michelle Butler  30:16 

Until fairly recently, like the 20th century, William was assumed to be writing the sort of history we think of as history, attempting to be objective. That seems kind of bizarre to a medievalist, right? Because we know very well that, of course, that’s not what he’s doing, but for the kind of casual reader with their own 19th century assumptions of what history means, where you’re trying to write objectively, it took a little while to catch on that William is, of course, siding with the Crusader kingdom. Of course he is. So that’s where his loyalties lie. Of course, that’s how he’s writing. But there are nuances within that. He despises, he hates with the power of a fiery sun, the Knights Templar.

Speaker 1  31:04 

Really? Why?

Michelle Butler  31:08 

He hates them. I didn’t dig into this a lot, but he appears to think that they’re arrogant meddlers, and he blames stuff on them that may or may not–he accuses them of having just flat out murdered messengers from the assassins. The king of the assassins. He accuses them of things. He hates them. And you can kind of see again, if your loyalties lie with the Kingdom of Jerusalem, they are kind of arrogant meddlers who are outside of government, but they want to come in and tell everybody what to do, and they’re the very self appointed guardians of the pilgrims. You can kind of see why he doesn’t like them.

Anne Brannen  31:50 

And they have money too. They got some power.

Michelle Butler  31:53 

So he hates them. The closest he comes to hagiography is when he talks about Baldwin. He adores Baldwin. And again, I’m cutting him all the slack with this. He taught that kid. He admired Baldwin’s bravery in the face of this diagnosis, he admired Baldwin’s efforts to fulfill his role, even though he was not well, that he actually goes out and leads his men into battle. He admires Baldwin, and good on him. I admire Baldwin too. I’m right there with him. I admire Baldwin. I am not saying every decision Baldwin made is correct, and I’m certainly not saying that the existence of the Crusader Kingdom is justifiable. I’m saying that Baldwin as a human being, is a brave and valiant person.

Anne Brannen  32:39 

I stand with you on this. No to the Crusader kingdom, no to the Crusaders, but hey, yeah, to brave people dealing with their leprosy and and fulfilling their role as God has given it to them.

Michelle Butler  32:51 

A couple more of the nuances inside of William’s approach to things is that he is more kindly disposed than other historians at the time towards the Byzantine Empire, and that probably is because he was an ambassador to them. So he saw nuances in the Byzantine leaders and the Byzantine nobles and the Empire itself than some of the other Western European historians who are just like these guys, who knows what they’re up to, and they’re practically as bad as the Muslims and blah, blah, blah. Interestingly, that nuance extends to the Muslim leaders.

Anne Brannen  33:25 

Really?

Michelle Butler  33:27 

Isn’t that interesting? He is, in fact, hostile to the surrounding Muslim kingdoms that that are continually trying to re recapture Jerusalem.

Anne Brannen  33:36 

Fine, that seems fair. I think that’s fair, for sure.

Michelle Butler  33:39 

But he does not consider Islam to be a pagan religion. He considers it to be a heretical sect of Christianity, and so he sees fellowship with them. He sees them as being similar to the Byzantines, that these are both kind of heretical sects of Christianity, and he often praises the bravery, brilliance and honor of the Muslim leaders like Saladin. He has nice things to say about Saladin. Now it is true he does not live to see the fall of Jerusalem when Saladin retakes it, so he probably would have complex views on that, but he recognizes him as being a brilliant leader.

Anne Brannen  34:21 

Saladin was a figure amongst the Muslim leaders that was, in general, in the West admired. He had an interesting position.

Michelle Butler  34:29 

He’s not the only Muslim leader that he praises, but he’s probably is the best known one. William did not give his book a name other than the Historia, which isn’t especially helpful. So it’s been given a few names, but probably the most common one is Deeds Done beyond the Sea. And this is fascinating. I told you that among the eight books I have over here, there’s maybe possibly four pages all together that talk about the slaughter. The Historia has more than that by itself. There’s at least half a dozen. He despises Andronicus. He despises him. So now I’m going to quote this. “Andronicus, a cousin of the late emperor, was a false and wicked man, ever disloyal to the Empire and ever active in sowing the seeds of conspiracy. In the time of the emperor, he had suffered chains and imprisonment because of his many crimes, ignominiously treated as his merits richly deserved” –so there’s a snarky little snark “–He became an exile and a fugitive and wandered over the entire east. Yet, even in his exile, he had been guilty of many disgraceful acts worthy of universal condemnation.” So William, tell us how you really feel about Andronicus. He loathes this man.

Anne Brannen  36:03 

Yeah, I haven’t been able to figure out any good points about Andronicus, actually.

Michelle Butler  36:09 

You went through the things that happened and William is largely the source for that.

Anne Brannen  36:14 

Okay.

Michelle Butler  36:15 

Some people sense bad stuff is happening. So anybody who could flee, tries to flee, and some of them get to their ships. But William tells us that the aged, the infirmed, those who were unable to flee were trapped, and dreadful things happened to them. We’re told that the place is burnt down, that women and children, everybody is killed in the flames, that they attack the bishop you talked about, the sub deacon of the Holy Roman Church. So that’s in William.The attack on the hospital. That’s in William. The people who were captured and then sold into slavery. That’s here in his account too. And then his synopsis, his conclusion, the last paragraph of his many pages. Well, not many, but half a dozen. “In such fashion did the perfidious Greek nation, a brood of vipers, like a serpent in the bosom or a mouse in the wardrobe, evilly requite their guests, those who had not deserved such treatment and were far from anticipating anything of the kind, those to whom they had given their daughters, nieces and sisters as wives, and who, by long living together, had become their friends.” I was really grateful to eventually find a translation of the Historia, because everything I was finding was saying, Oh, he’s this really important source. I’m like, Well, what did he have to actually say? Why don’t any of these books over here, the Oxford Handbook of Byzantine studies, a Cambridge history of the Byzantine Empire–why don’t any of them cite specifically what William has to say, instead of synopsizing it? A history of Byzantium. I thought it was reasonable to assume that these books would talk about this in more detail, but I finally found a translation, and found what William himself had to say, and it was worth it.

Anne Brannen  38:13 

It’s online, right? So you can give us the link in the notes.

Michelle Butler  38:17 

This particular translation is out of copyright, so it is on the Internet Archive, and I will give you a link to it. Once I had found out more about Andronicus. He is a dreadful, dreadful human being.

Anne Brannen  38:32 

So William was correct in his assessment.

Michelle Butler  38:35 

Yes. Andronicus is a bad dude. He is charismatic as a young person. One of the things that’s really fascinating about him is he’s an old man when he stages this coup. He’s not old by 21st century standards, but by the standards of who is staging coups in the 12th century, it’s not a 67 year old man. And he is 67 years old, roughly speaking–he’s in the late 60s. As a young man, he had been very, very charismatic, but also always pushing the envelope. So when William is talking about he was constantly an annoyance, and then he had to be sent over here, and then he had to be sent over there. King Manuel can’t let him stay in Constantinople because he’s such a troublemaker. That’s true. That is absolutely true. Andronicus is a thorn in Manuel’s side, and he is constantly for a while. He has him imprisoned over there for a while. He sends him into exile and everywhere that Andronicus goes, I shit you not, he finds a cousin and seduces her. It’s like a hobby. There’s at least four. Isn’t that bonkers?

Anne Brannen  39:47 

To be fair, everybody was cousins, as we have shown many times. Cousins are easy to find in the Middle Ages when you’re in the nobility.

Michelle Butler  39:57 

He is a horrible human being. At one point, he seduces his cousin, Theodosia, who is Manuel’s niece, and they trot on back to Constantinople–and, ‘you can’t stay here. You can’t marry, you’re too closely related. I can’t condone you living in sin like this. I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you a house up here on the water, away from the city, it’ll be great. You go there.’ And indeed, that is where he goes, until he sees his opportunity, after Manuel dies, to come back on stage the coup. What a terrible human being. There are many, many disgusting things Andronicus does, but I think number one on my list of disgusting things Andronicus does–again, 67 years old, roughly speaking–when he stages this coup: he marries Alexios’ widow, who was 12.

Anne Brannen  40:54 

Oh god.

Michelle Butler  40:55 

Agnes of France was 12 years old. Alexios was probably 14 when he died. The historian I was reading about this said, even at this time, that was raising eyebrows, because there’s an age difference, and there’s a 55 year age difference.

Anne Brannen  41:18 

We have cases of royalty marrying as children, but they marry as children, but they’re not actually a husband and wife until later. It’s a political construction. Except in the case of Margaret Beaufort, she really was 13 when she had Henry, so she never had any more children, because it did a lot of damage.

Michelle Butler  41:38 

Yeah, it’s not entirely clear if Agnes and Alexios had consummated this marriage, because they had married, but by the time he died, she’s 12, he’s 14, that could very easily have still just been a legal–she was living in Constantinople obviously, because she’d been sent there when this arranged marriage had been put together. But–just gross. So once I read a little bit about Andronicus, I thought it was highly probable there were going to be historical novels about him, but because really who could resist. I was not disappointed.

Anne Brannen  42:19 

Although there was no opera, there were some books.

Michelle Butler  42:22 

There’s no opera, except the Google AI is desperate to write it.

Anne Brannen  42:26 

Yeah, it’s working on it. It’s gonna be on YouTube pretty soon, written by the Google AI.

Michelle Butler  42:32 

We’ll give it a week, and it will have churned this through.

Anne Brannen  42:35 

It’s not very good at writing stories. I’ve been reading some of them on YouTube, and really, AI is very bad at writing stories. It’s not got a real firm grasp of how grammar or how people’s names work, or even narrative arc, but we move on.

Michelle Butler  42:48 

So would you like to know about the novels about Andronicus?

Anne Brannen  42:52 

Tell me. Please tell me about the novels.

Michelle Butler  42:55 

As far as I can tell, there are no novels that are focused just on the massacre of the Latins. But why would there be, since there’s no scholarship that focuses just on the massacre or the Latins. There’s no book. There is a book, a novel, written originally in Greek in 1961 called Their Most Serene Majesties. It’s by Ange Vlachos, and it was translated into English in 1963 by Kay Cicellus. At this point, I’m going to go back over to the book jacket. There’s a copy of it on eBay, and they have nice pictures, so I can actually read a little bit of the book jacket to you. “The unusual setting of this novel is Byzantium in the 12th century, at the time of the Crusades, when that great empire began its dramatic decline. The narrator is a high court official with a sardonic cast of mind, who as a devoted servant in the house of Komnenus, has followed closely the turbulent events of three reigns, those of John the good, Manuel, and Andronicus, the last three emperors of that dynasty. Through his impartial eyes, an amazingly vivid picture emerges of the political, military and theological issues of the day. If ever there were men whom the gods wished to destroy and first made mad, they were Manuel and Andronicus. Neither was without charm, but power, and the lust for power corrupted them both.” I kind of want to read this book now.

Anne Brannen  44:19 

That sounds sort of like fun.

Michelle Butler  44:23 

So that actually is a structure that we see again, that it’s not about Andronicus exclusively, but those last three Komnenus emperors, and he is one of them. We see the same thing in Michael Arnold’s 1975 novel Against the Fall of Night, which is a big honkin’ 700 page book that covers these last three emperors leading up to the sack of Constantinople. But Andronicus’ is section is a healthy 150 pages. So the next book does not focus on Andronicus. He’s not the main character, but the main character meets him, but I wanted to include it because it’s by Louis L’Amour.

Anne Brannen  45:04 

No.

Michelle Butler  45:06 

I kid you not.

Anne Brannen  45:08 

Our Byzantine emperor is a cowboy?

Michelle Butler  45:12 

It is called The Walking Drum, from 1984, and it is one of his few books that is not a Western, but the main character kind of behaves like a cowboy, just in 12th century Europe, because he’s constantly wandering around, you know, and doing cowboy things.

Anne Brannen  45:40 

I totally want to read this. I want to read this so bad now.

Michelle Butler  45:44 

The Walking Drum is what it’s called, and the main character meets Andronicus and apparently prophesies his horrible death, which is easy to do when you already know what’s going to happen 1500 years earlier, but Louis L’Amour–are kidding me? In 1980, Kostas Kyriazis–he’s Greek, and he wrote in Greek, and as far as I can tell, it has not been translated into English, which makes me sad. A book called Agnes of France–

Anne Brannen  46:13 

Oh, oh.

Michelle Butler  46:14 

That is about her.

Anne Brannen  46:17 

No, I can’t read this. I do not know that language at all. I can’t even pretend to read it.

Michelle Butler  46:23 

I suspect that this book is a heavy lift, but is probably really interesting because her life was rough, but she’s a really interesting character to pick to tell this series of disastrous events through, because you can’t do anything about any of them except try not to get killed. So that is really unfortunate that it has not been translated.

Anne Brannen  46:48 

And what year was this again?

Michelle Butler  46:50 

1980.

Anne Brannen  46:50 

Yeah, probably not getting translated.

Michelle Butler  46:53 

I think we may have mentioned Baldolino when we talked about the fall of Constantinople, because that’s Umberto Eco’s book from 2000. It’s one of his last novels. This is also a book where Andronicus is encountered rather than focused on, but it’s Umberto Eco, so much like Louis L’amour, needs to be mentioned.

Anne Brannen  47:11 

Although, really, he’s closer to writing about this kind of thing than L’amour is in general.

Michelle Butler  47:16 

Yes. This is a different kind of book, though, than The Name of the Rose, which is his best known book. This is a mix of historical fiction, historical fantasy, magical realism. So it kind of starts out with everything sort of looks like the real world. And then they go on this adventure, and all of a sudden, magical beings and legendary figures–like they meet Prester John.

Anne Brannen  47:37 

Of course. They do, yes, of course.

Michelle Butler  47:40 

And there’s also a mystery where our main character, Baldolino, has to solve what is essentially a locked room mystery. So Umberto Effing Eco is allowed to experiment as much as he wants, and who am I to say otherwise? Unsurprisingly, reviews are mixed because it’s him experimenting beyond where he would have been working before. It is a big–great, big book, and I have not finished it.

Anne Brannen  48:02 

But you’re enjoying reading it?

Michelle Butler  48:04 

I don’t know if I’m loving the the mix of genres. But again, we need to include it because he is mentioned. I am not terribly surprised that Andronicus is such a magnet for fiction because he’s just a larger than life character with this horrific ending. What’s not to love? Everything about it is already over the top. You don’t have to exaggerate anything.

Anne Brannen  48:34 

Well. And as Google AI says, somebody should write an opera about it. And so we mention this to our listeners, because I’m not going to write that opera. I can’t write opera.

Michelle Butler  48:43 

Oh and there’s another one. I forgot one. I’m sorry. I forgot to put this one on my list, but it’s the most recent. One is from 2017. It’s a historical novel called The Man Who Would Be Emperor: Andreas Komnenos’ Journey to the Purple at Constantinople. This one is a little less well known than some of the other ones, because this is a self published book. It was published posthumously. The author worked on it over the course of his life, and then his sons published it after his death. But it is actually a novel focused on Andronicus, and it’s from 2019, having been worked on through much of the 20th century. So it’s worth throwing it in there and mentioning it.

Anne Brannen  49:27 

Thank you.

Michelle Butler  49:28 

I’m utterly thrown by this being described as ‘for young adults reading age 14 through 18.’ I can’t see how that’s age appropriate, so I’m hoping that’s maybe an error on Amazon’s part.

Anne Brannen  49:42 

Yeah, for that age group, you’d really have to leave out a lot of his life, actually.

Michelle Butler  49:48 

But that is what I have. Actually, as a haul for historical fiction, that’s pretty good.

Anne Brannen  49:53 

Yeah, that’s not bad at all. Thank you. That’s our discussion of the massacre of the Latins, which really is not as well known as it ought to be, and as Google AI points out, there’s no opera. What the hell? So one of you should go write this. I’m not going to, Michelle, you’re not writing an opera, are you?

Michelle Butler  50:10 

I doubt it. I guess I’m never going to say never, but that seems improbable.

Anne Brannen  50:14 

Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to. I don’t know that I want to say never, because, you know, you don’t want to name the well from which you will not drink. But I don’t think I’m doing an opera.

Michelle Butler  50:22 

Yeah, I keep saying I’m never going to do things, and then I do those things, so I’ve learned to stop doing that. But it seems unlikely.

Anne Brannen  50:30 

Yeah, me too, yeah. Don’t name the well, but that’s unlikely. The next time you hear from us, we are going to be, actually, it’s in the same century. For some reason or other, we’ve been doing a lot in this century, but we’re going to be in Sweden in 1156, because King Sverk was assassinated by a servant while he was in his coach. So we are going to go to Sweden. We haven’t been in Sweden in a while. If at all, I don’t know. Have we been in Sweden? Oh, yes, I think we have, I can’t remember now what it was, but which king was it that wrote a fake genealogy because he didn’t want to be married to his queen anymore?

Michelle Butler  51:09 

That was in France.  You’re thinking of it because she, Ingeborg, was from Denmark.

Anne Brannen  51:22 

Okay, yes. The whole idea of creating a fake genealogy. And everybody’s like, No, this is not true.

Michelle Butler  51:30 

I’m sure we’ve been in Sweden, but right at the moment, I’m not remembering.

Anne Brannen  51:36 

I don’t. But we’re going to Sweden. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. And we can be found at Spotify, at Apple podcast, and all the places where the podcasts hang out, we’re generally there. And you can find us specifically at truecrime medieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. And there you can find links to the podcast and the show notes and transcriptions. When we get them up, they take a while, and so they don’t come up immediately. And on that page there’s an link to an index so that you can look things up if you want to know, for instance, about the siege of Constantinople–what we might have to say about it. It’s there in the index, and you can leave comments. We like that, and you can give us suggestions about crimes that we ought to look at. We got one recently, Michelle, did you see that? Did I send it to you? I should. I’ll send it to you.

Michelle Butler  52:32 

I’m sorry. When I have more brain cells working again, I’ll find it.

Anne Brannen  52:37 

Or I could send it to you, if I ever get any brain cells working–either one of those things could happen. You never know. Don’t name the well. Yeah, yeah. And you can reach us through there, yeah. So we’ll see you in Sweden next time bye.

109.King Duncan Gets Killed, Pitgaveny, Scotland 14 August 1040

Anne Brannen  0:23 

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:32 

And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa, where we have our air conditioning on for the first time today.

Anne Brannen  0:39 

We haven’t turned our swamp coolers on yet, because if we do, that involves turning the heaters off and then putting the swamp coolers on. And we have done that before at this time of the year, because it is a little warm, but it might snow later, so we have to not do that, because we’re back and forth.

Michelle Butler  0:53 

Yeah, this is just a free trial of July. In three days, it’ll be back to normal April weather.

Anne Brannen  0:59 

March and April. Too much fun. Today we want to talk about the time that Duncan mac Crinain was killed at Pitgaveny, Scotland in 1040. This is King Duncan, who many of you may recognize because there’s a play that some people know about where this guy named Macbeth murders Duncan in his bed when he’s really old man. Okay, so you may know that story, which is actually a story, but there was a King Duncan, and he did actually die at Pitgaveny in Scotland. I’ll be discussing why it is this is even on a crime list, because really it’s sort of not. But every time that we are looking up all our stuff and finding our sources, and trying to tell you the real stuff, we discover that, of course, there are contradictions, and people believe different things. I have never, ever in–what is this, six years we’ve been doing this, Michelle? five, six years–I have never come across a historical issue that has so much contradiction. It’s just so much contradiction. I’m going to tell you what’s going on as best I can, but I’m not gonna–I’m just–there’s a bunch of stuff we don’t know. However, there are some things we do know, and now I will tell you what they are. Duncan was King of Scotland, and he had succeeded his grandfather, who was Malcolm the second. He had been king of Alba, which is king of Scotland, and Duncan succeeded him in 1034. Malcolm had ruled for a long time, like 30 years, and died when he was 80 at Glamis castle. And there’s a poem in Irish which says that he died fighting. So let’s just go with that. He was fighting. He was 80. He’s all dead, and Malcolm had no sons. So what he had done was he had married his daughters off to guys who had power and might have been his rivals, because he was trying to establish his line that so that it would continue even though he had no sons, and so there was a possibility then that a grandson would inherit his throne. Duncan was the son of Malcolm’s oldest daughter, Bethoc and Crinen, who was not a King of Scotland, but was one of those really powerful royal warrior abbot. Royal warrior abbot. We had somebody–what was it? Czechoslovakia? Poland?–we had another warrior abbot.

Michelle Butler  3:27 

We run across them a fair amount. That’s actually even difficult to say–a royal warrior abbot. There’s a lot of R’s in there.

Anne Brannen  3:37 

There are a lot of R’s. And so it’s problematic. So the royal warrior abbot was the father of Duncan the first, that’s who our Duncan is, and he was the grandfather of King Malcolm the third, who is Duncan’s son. All right, now there’s gonna be a side note here. The various surviving king lists and chronicles. They give varying lines of descent and names of the mothers of the kings. And indeed, there’s hardly a point in this history that isn’t given in like, three, four, or five different ways. I am just doing my best here. I’m just telling you these people were real, a bunch of them, some not, but I’ll tell you later, people were real, and they actually died, and there were kings involved. All right, so we’re going to take it as given that all these people were closely related because we get given these different names of fathers. They’re all closely related, though we might be unclear on the details. So back to Duncan. Duncan had a wife who has different names, obviously, depending on whom you’re reading, or it actually might be two wives, depending on whom you’re reading. He had at least two sons, Malcolm and Donald. Later, after the death of Duncan’s successor, Malcolm will be Malcolm, the third, the King of Scotland. And then after him, Donald, will be Donald the third, that’s Donald Ban. So I guess he must have been blonde or, you know, maybe he just liked to wear white. But anyway, Donald Ban. When Duncan took the throne, he was young, and he was still young when he died, and one of his warlords was Macbeth. Macbeth may well have been another grandson of Malcolm the second, the son of a younger daughter, Donada. And so in that case, they were cousins. They were first cousins. They were related. At any rate, in 1032 Macbeth became the Earl of Moray, which he managed by killing the previous earl, Gille Coemgáin, and gone and marrying his widow, Gruoch. Gruoch and Gille Coemgain had a son, Lulach, and he was going to be king of Scots later. I’ll get to that. So just hang on. Anyway, Gille Coemgain died by being burnt to death in a hall with 50 of his men, and we think Macbeth was responsible for it on account of Gille Coemgain had become the Earl of Moray by murdering Macbeth’s father, who had been the Earl of Moray before being killed. I’m sorry to tell you that the annals of Ulster do not specify how he was killed, so I’m sure it was something really exciting, perhaps not as exciting as getting your hall burnt down over your head with 50 of your men in it.

Michelle Butler  3:37 

But that is hell of a crime, actually. Wow, wow, wow. So he doesn’t end up murdering Duncan probably, but holy crap.

Anne Brannen  4:54 

He murdered the Earl of Moray and married his widow. Or perhaps not. We have so many instances of reams of humans dying because people burnt houses down over their heads, or churches down over their heads or whatnot. It’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility. So Macbeth became the Earl of Moray. There you go. And that brought that power back into the family. And Moray had not ever been really entirely supportive of the Scottish kings. It was an autonomous power and kind of held itself somewhat apart. And so Duncan wasn’t really supported by them, and he wasn’t an admirable King. I remind you that Macbeth is a warlord, but Duncan’s not so great. By the time Duncan and Macbeth were in Moray at the same time, Duncan had been attacked by Eadwulf of Bernicia, and had only gotten out of that trouble because his brother Maldred had helped him out. And then a couple of years later, Duncan attacked Durham and got his nephew Madden to attack Caithness, and in the process, he lost the battle of Caithness and the Battle of Durham at the same time. After that, Duncan attacked Orkney, and though he barely escaped with his life, Madden was at that time, killed. And so it’s at that point that Duncan either retreated into Moray or he attacked Moray. I’ve seen both of those things written down. But anyway, he went into Moray, where his warlord, Macbeth who didn’t really support him, because he was a sort of mean doofus and a not a very good soldier. So things didn’t go very well there, and Macbeth’s army slaughtered Duncan’s army, and also Duncan, who was in it. That was at Pitgaveny, August 13, 1040. So that’s how Duncan died. It was in battle. So we’re all clear on that. Let’s just all remember that what happened was that there was a battle and Duncan was fighting and he lost. That was what happened. Macbeth may well have done very bad things before, but this is just defending his territory. Okay, all right, okay. So then, because Duncan’s son, Malcolm, was still a child, Macbeth inherited the throne of Scotland. That’s how Macbeth became king. All right, okay, so we’ve now noticed that Duncan died in battle and he wasn’t wickedly murdered in his old age by Macbeth, because that story comes later. So our crime today, in True Crime Medieval, is fictional, but the death was real. All right. Then what happened after? Well, Macbeth ruled for like, 17 years. And that 17 years was actually bizarrely fairly peaceful. We’ll take a little rest there while we take that in. Though, there was this point at which the English invaded in 1054, of which invasion that the battle of the Seven Sleepers, we get an enormous amount of report. There’s so much writing about this battle, which is sometimes called the Battle of Seven Sleepers, and sometimes called the Battle of Dunsinane, although it is not the Battle of Dunsinane. And all of this writing tells you different things, but there’s a lot of writing. It was really important. Exactly what happened was not important, apparently. Anyway, Macbeth was still King of Scotland, and then a few years later, it’s like in 1057, Macbeth did in fact, meet his end, because Malcolm, the son of Duncan, who was a child when his father died, as you remember, had actually grown up. He had been sheltered someplace. Again, we’re told several places that he could have been. We have no idea, really, where it was. We don’t know. There’s no consensus. But he did grow up, and he grew up to be a powerful bullying mean sort of person. He had the nickname Canmore, which is Big Head and just not many people were a match for him, really, but the English invasion may actually have been in support of his taking the throne back from Macbeth and Moray. But certainly the Battle of Lumphanan in Aberdeenshire in 1057 was meant to put down Macbeth, and Macbeth was killed in that battle. Macbeth’s stepson, Lulach, if you remember this is Gruoch’s son, his wife’s son, Macbeth’s stepson, became King of Scotland for about something like three months, and then he got killed by Malcolm a few months later, because Malcolm assassinated him, or Malcolm ambushed him and killed him with treachery, or Malcolm killed him in battle. There’s one of those things again, once again, I tell you, the chronicles go in several different directions. So he’s dead, he’s dead, dead, dead. And Malcolm became king. Malcolm the third. Malcolm Canmore the third. He was pretty powerful, but the Highlanders never supported him. The Highlanders didn’t support him. And he ruled for about 35 years. He invaded England five times, and his line, the bloodline that he established, remained kings of Scotland for about 200 years. His second wife, Margaret, became a saint. Saint Margaret of Scotland. Now a word as to Duncan’s real death in battle becoming a fictional crime. Michelle is going to take you through much more of this, but I want to give you kind of the bones of it. Raphael Holinshed, who, with four other contributors, published, Holinshed’s Chronicles. a history of England and Scotland and Ireland, in 1577. That’s the guy that’s Shakespeare used as his source, his main source, for both King Lear and Macbeth. Kit Marlowe was going to use this for Edward the second. It’s a really great book, and it was very popular. In Holinshed’s history, Macbeth is helped by Banquo to murder King Duncan, and then ascends the throne and rules for a while until he’s overthrown and beheaded. Shakespeare will add Lady Macbeth being part of the murder and make Banquo much more virtuous than he is in Holinshed’s version. There’s wood nymphs in Holinshed who prophesy that Macbeth is going to be king, but they’re going to be witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. I think Michelle told me that they were witches earlier, but she’s going to explain that. Holinshed’s Chronicles–because he didn’t make all this stuff out of whole cloth. No. He used John of Fordun’s Chronica Gentis Scotorum and Andrew of Winton’s original chronicle of Scotland as its sources for the Macbeth part. John of Fordun has Duncan murdered in battle, and has Malcolm killing Macbeth in hand to hand combat. Malcolm Canmore does kill Macbeth, and Macbeth does kill Duncan, but it’s in battle both times. John of Fordun also introduces Macduff, the Thane of Fife, who wasn’t there because he didn’t exist. Banquo first shows up though in Hector Boece’s Scotorum Historiae and he was considered in the 16th century to be an historical character–like, you know, King James descended from him, but no, because he wasn’t there either. So as time goes on and that story morphs, Duncan really sort of disappears. Our protagonist really disappears. He wasn’t a good king. He was a dreadful war leader. He died fairly young, in battle, but by the time Shakespeare’s Macbeth hits the stage, he’s this old man murdered in his bed, and really not much more than kind of a plot device in a play that’s using a spurious Scottish history to focus on characters full of ambition and treachery. It’s like he doesn’t really matter. It’s just that somebody has to be doing something really godawful, which in this case is murdering this old man in his bed rather than burning an entire hall down over the heads of some guy and 50 of his men. There were bad things going on, but they get so mixed around. I find it so interesting that-what Michelle is going to talk to us about is what happens to this story. You know, where did it come from? It’s just so slippery. There’s so much work, there’s so many scholars working on this, what the hell happened? You can find many books on this subject. It isn’t just that it becomes slippery after Shakespeare writes a play, and then we all move things around. Or it isn’t just that it’s slippery hen Holinshed is writing stuff. No, no, it’s slippery from the beginning. The Chronicles and kings lists from the beginning are telling you various different things. There was a Duncan. He was king for a while. There was a Macbeth. He was king for a while. There was a Malcolm. He was king for a while. There were battles and people died. So that’s what I have to say about Duncan. There was not actually a murder, but he did die. Michelle, your turn.

Michelle Butler  15:41 

I think it would be useful also to contextualize the time period we’re talking about, because the fact that chronicles are so slippery, it would be easy to assume that we are 300 years earlier than we are, but we are in the 11th century. There is no good reason for there to not be good sources.

Anne Brannen  16:05 

No, because you could have good sources in the eighth century.

Michelle Butler  16:09 

Yep, yep. It is really easy to think we’re in the seventh or eighth century with how sparse and scattered and contradictory the sources are, but by the time you’re in the 11th century, there’s no excuse for this. Orderic is going to be coming on the scene here within a generation.

Anne Brannen  16:29 

That’s why I was so surprised by this, because it’s the first time that I’ve come across this. I’m used to seeing different people saying different things and figuring out what’s going on, and sometimes you don’t really know, but I had never seen it at this level.

Michelle Butler  16:43 

It’s really, really interesting. The book that I read is actually really marvelous. It’s called Macbeth Before Shakespeare. It’s by Benjamin Hudson. It is Oxford University Press, and it’s 2023, so this is some new stuff.

Anne Brannen  16:59 

I saw that, and I thought about that. Did you get it through the library? Or did you buy it?

Michelle Butler  17:03 

I bought it.

Anne Brannen  17:04 

Of course, you bought it.

Michelle Butler  17:07 

I did.

Anne Brannen  17:08 

You need this on the shelf.

Michelle Butler  17:09 

Well, I bought it in a Kindle version so that I can search it and make notes and stuff in it. He makes the point that by the standards of the 11th century, Macbeth’s reign is fairly successful.

Anne Brannen  17:23 

Yeah, isn’t that weird?

Michelle Butler  17:24 

So it’s not just that you go from a king who was meh to turning him into a tyrant and a dreadful human. You turn somebody who was actually fairly good at the job into an absolutely terrible–so it’s a much bigger shift. He points out, for example, that Macbeth is the only known medieval Scottish King to have taken a pilgrimage to Rome.

Anne Brannen  17:55 

Oh, I didn’t know that.

Michelle Butler  17:56 

In 1050, which tells you a lot. It tells you that he felt comfortable, that he felt in in control. You know, you can’t leave if you feel shaky on the throne, because it’s going to be at least a year trip, if not a two year trip. He invited Norman knights to Scotland. It was part of the politics with England. Edward the Confessor boots them out, and Macbeth invites them to Scotland. It’s easy to have the stereotype of Scotland being the backward place up there, but Macbeth and the other Scottish kings are clearly deeply involved with the politics of Ireland, with the politics of England. They have contacts with France. I’m just reminding us that no matter what we’ve seen in the movies, they’re not a bunch of isolated barbarians. But according to my historian here, what really, really gets Macbeth in trouble is that his line dies out.

Anne Brannen  18:54 

Ah. And it’s Malcolm’s that continues.

Michelle Butler  18:57 

Uh huh. That is where he gets in trouble. That Malcolm’s descendants survive and his–Macbeth’s–line die out, so they get to enhance the reputation of their house by sullying his. We were talking before we started recording that this is a very similar move to what the Tudors do 500 years later to Richard. Richard the third dies in battle, and then his line is gone, and the Tudors turn him into the absolute monster that had to be defeated in order to restore a virtuous kingdom. John of Fordun sets the tone with that. He’s working in the 14th century. He very much has no ambiguity. Macbeth is all bad. Malcolm is all good. There’s no real attempt to have a balanced approach. Andrew of Wintoun, who is also 14th century, is, I thought, the most interesting of the ones that I read about, because he’s the one who drags in the supernatural bits and the folklore.

Anne Brannen  20:05 

Are they witches or wood nymphs?

Michelle Butler  20:06 

In his version, they’re weird sisters. They’re witches.

Anne Brannen  20:09 

All right, so Shakespeare goes back, okay.

Michelle Butler  20:11 

He’s the one who adds in the idea that Macbeth is descended from the devil. He adds in prophetic dreams. He adds in a little bit of incest, that Macbeth has to kill Duncan, who is described as his uncle, and then marry his widow, his aunt, which doesn’t actually come down to us.

Anne Brannen  20:34 

Yeah, no, no, no, that’s another thing that didn’t happen.

Michelle Butler  20:37 

So he pulls in all this stuff from Scottish folklore from Norse folklore. There’s ethereal dogs, there’s magic rings.

Anne Brannen  20:47 

I want to know about the ethereal dogs.

Michelle Butler  20:49 

I don’t know any more about it, except that Hudson says there’s ethereal dogs, and yes, I would like to know more about it too. I think he’s fascinating, right? Because the point that Hudson makes over and over again is that these historians, this line of historians, have contemporaries who are arguing them and telling them, this is not what happened. So it’s not the case that this becomes the unchallenged narrative, but it becomes the popular narrative. In that way it’s similar to Arthurian histories at the time, where you have historians asserting that he conquered all of Europe, and then you have other guys saying, if that happened, it would be in the European Chronicles too. Sit down and shut up. That’s not a good story. So all three of these guys, John of Fordun and Andrew Wintoun and then Hector Boece, have contemporaries who are saying that is not what happened, but it’s A) a good story, and B) good politics. So it ends up being the narrative that gets retold.

Anne Brannen  21:54 

Yeah, it’s a good story. The whole dying in battle thing that’s like, so, you know, banal. Who doesn’t die in battle when they’re king. Yeah, blah, blah, blah.

Michelle Butler  22:01 

Interesting, though, all the supernatural stuff gets added in, and then Hector Boece backs off that. He does not include that. He does add in Banquo, and it’s a much more–his presentation of Macbeth is much more balanced than the earlier two.

Anne Brannen  22:17 

Why is he adding in Banquo? He needs like a foil for Macbeth to be talking about?

Michelle Butler  22:21 

He adds in Banquo. He is helping against the invaders from Scandinavia. He’s a friend, I guess. Holinshed, then is Shakespeare’s direct source. Hudson makes the point that interest in Scotland in general, by the late 16th century, as Elizabeth aged and it seemed very likely that James was going to be her heir–interest in Scotland increases, and so Macbeth is not in the only play dealing with Scotland by the late 16th, early 17th century, which I think is an interesting point. On the face of it, you would not think that Macbeth is a piece that would be intended to suck up to the new or incoming Scottish king, but since James is descended from Malcolm’s line, it ends up working.

Anne Brannen  23:18 

And Banquo too.

Michelle Butler  23:21 

All of the playwrights working in the late 16th century have form for sucking up to the Tudors. They’re really just taking the same technique and applying it elsewhere. One of the things I was utterly fascinated to find out about is where the idea that you can’t say the name of the play in the theater came from. If you google this, you will find people telling you earnestly and wide eyed that this goes all the way back to–

Anne Brannen  23:48 

Shakespeare? You had to go like, what, go out of the Globe and bang on the door–go around three times and throw salt over your shoulder, what?

Michelle Butler  23:59 

All the way back to 1606 to the first performance of Macbeth, when the actor playing Lady Macbeth dropped dead during the production, and Shakespeare had to step in and play the role himself.

Anne Brannen  24:16 

So the whole history of this thing is just people making stuff up.

Michelle Butler  24:19 

Yeah, it is a bullshit magnet, really. Where this story appears to have come from is Max Beerbohm in the 19th century. That is the the earliest written record, the earliest traceable written record of anybody talking about this as being a cursed play–is Max Beerbohm, 19th century producer, actor and producer. There have been tragedies associated with the play–for example, the actor playing Macbeth was accidentally wounded in one of the stage battles in 1947 and ended up dying from the injury. A) that is afterMax Beerbohm and B) if you have 400 years of performance history, surely that’s not a statistical outlier. There are going to be things that have happened. There just are. In the time that we lived in Maryland, there was a real disaster that happened in our local theater where an actor stepped too far back and fell into the orchestra pit, and was really, really injured. But as far as I know, that particular play wasn’t Macbeth. I don’t believe that particular play is cursed. I think occasionally things just happen.

Anne Brannen  25:35 

I always worry about stepping backward into the orchestra. I think that’s a very big problem.

Michelle Butler  25:40 

I think that it’s very interesting that this story grows up around this play. Everything about this, like we were talking about, attracts people wanting to add their bit in. So unsurprisingly, there are buckets and buckets and buckets of creative response of various types. Some are responding or reinterpreting or retelling the play, Shakespeare’s play. Some are attempting to go back, way back and tell the real history. God bless you. Good luck with that.

Anne Brannen  26:18 

whatever the hell it is,

Michelle Butler  26:19 

Some are springboarding more from the earlier sources. Some are focusing on Macbeth. Some are focusing on Lady Macbeth. Some are embracing the supernatural elements, like, let’s just go for it. The earliest novel that I found was from 1865.

Anne Brannen  26:35 

English?

Michelle Butler  26:36 

Russian.

Anne Brannen  26:37 

No!

Michelle Butler  26:38 

Yes. That’s why I gotta talk about this one in particular. 1865 Russian novella called Lady Macbeth of the Metensk district. It’s by Nikolai Lezkov. It moves the action to Imperial Russia and to the merchant class of Imperial Russia, and it swaps the gender roles. So instead of Lady Macbeth being the instigator, but Macbeth actually carrying out the murder, it has him being the instigator and she actually does the stabbing, which is interesting. That I thought was really, really fascinating. I will include in the source list the giant, giant lists on Goodreads and the Historical Novel Society of all of the novels that are responding to or retelling Macbeth in one way or another. There was one just last year, a book by Ava Reed called Lady Macbeth. 2024. So it’s not a thing that went into fashion and then went out of fashion. It is still an active source that people are responding to, which I think is interesting. There’s tons of other stuff. There’s at least one opera –Verdi, 1847, that actually is based on Shakespeare. There’s a couple of musicals which are responding to Shakespeare, more than one. There are many, many plays. But I picked one in particular that I’m very excited about, that. I actually would like to see. It is called Mac Beth, so two separate words, and it is about a set of girls going from their private school out into the woods and performing Macbeth together, just for funsies. And it leads to one of them ending up dead. I would like to see that.

Anne Brannen  28:23 

Yeah, I want to see that too. Somebody needs to put that on somewhere in between, like Alabama and New Mexico, so we can both go. Or it could go on tour.

Michelle Butler  28:30 

That would be really, really interesting. This is a fairly recent play, actually, 2019, 2018, something. So it’s a fairly recent, within the last 10 years, play that I think would be really interesting to see. I do not actually have a bunch more about this.

Anne Brannen  28:46 

It’s like it’s too vast to talk about.

Michelle Butler  28:48 

It really, really is. Except Dorothy Dunnett, of course. The marvelous and amazing Dorothy Dunnett has a Macbeth novel.

Anne Brannen  28:56 

I don’t know who this is.

Michelle Butler  28:59 

She’s a historical novelist. She writes historical fiction. She’s a huge influence on the guy who writes Game of Thrones, whose name escapes me right at this instant.

Anne Brannen  29:10 

Oh, yeah. Okay, yeah. And drinks coffee in Santa Fe. Martin–

Michelle Butler  29:14 

George RR Martin, yes. So Dorothy Dunnett lived from 1923 to 2001. She’s Scottish. She wrote a ton of novels. She’s probably best known for the Lyman historical novels, but she has one that is a retelling of Macbeth, and I believe it is called King Hereafter. I’m clicking to double check that. Yeah, King Hereafter, it’s from 1976.

Anne Brannen  29:39 

Okay, thank you. So basically, in the show notes, you’re going to give us, like, a long list of links to long lists.

Michelle Butler  29:46 

Yes, I am. I am. I do not think you would find it interesting for me to just read to you the list of a bunch of novels’ names. But if going and reading retellings of Macbeth or of attempting to recover the history of the real Macbeth and then retell that, is your jam: good news.

Anne Brannen  30:06 

There are places to go.

Michelle Butler  30:08 

There are so many places to go. And of course, I do highly recommend the book, if you want to know more about how the legend developed before Shakespeare got a hold of it. Macbeth before Shakespeare, Benjamin Hudson’s book, is quite good, very readable. I do like to make sure to tell you, give a fair warning if something is academically dense. This is readable by a general audience, even though it’s published by Oxford University Press.

Anne Brannen  30:38 

That’s us, you know, disentangling Duncan and Macbeth as far as we can, only to let you know that the really the tangle is very, very big. And so what basically, we all need to do is just kind of find a piece of the yarn that we want to keep and just clip it where we can and then that can be ours. Because if we all do that, then we can just make it all into one big ball of nicely wound up yarn that isn’t all over the floor in a bunch of tangles. But at the moment, that’s where it is. So that’s us, and the next time that you hear from us, we’re gonna go to Kyiv 1235, because Michael Chernigov refused to worship pagan idols, and so he got slaughtered by the Golden Horde. And we get to talk about lots of things, lots of things, and we do love Kyiv, so we’ll go there.

Michelle Butler  31:29 

Yes, that’s going to be a lot of fun.

Anne Brannen  31:32 

This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. We can be found on Spotify and Apple podcast, and all the places where the podcasts are hanging out.We ourselves are at True Crime Medieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. There you can find links to the podcast and links to the show notes and the transcriptions, which we get up as soon as we can, and The Index, which helps you figure out where things like the Great Famine are, things like that. You can go looking, and can leave comments, which we love, and you can get a hold of us. And if you’ve got any, if you know of any medieval crimes that we’ve missed, they’re not in the index, just send them on to us. They might not be in our list. We have a long list. How long is this list? We’ve been doing this for years. How long is this?

Michelle Butler  32:28 

Oh, 16 pages. I think.

Anne Brannen  32:30 

People were so bad, and it’s 1000 years. Anyway, send us something because we maybe don’t have it. We keep adding things to the list.

Michelle Butler  32:38 

I’m currently reading a book called Uppity Women of the Middle Ages. Not surprisingly, there’s a few crimes in there that I’m adding in to the list.

Anne Brannen  32:48 

Yeah, yeah. Because we’re under the impression that this will keep us going till we’re like, dead and off the planet ourselves. And so anyway, you can get a hold of us there and send us things. And that is what we have today. Bye.

Michelle Butler  33:03 

Bye.

108. April Fool’s Episode: Pope Joan, Rome 855-857

Anne Brannen  0:23 

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I am Anne Brannen. I’m your host in Albuquerque,

Michelle Butler  0:32 

And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:36 

We like when we can to have special episodes for April Fool’s Day in honor of the many fools that have been in the collection of humans that have lived on the planet as long as the humans have lived on the planet. Anyway, we like to do that, and the way we celebrate it is by looking at things which people think happened in the Middle Ages but didn’t. Today we want to talk about Pope Joan. Spoiler alert: she wasn’t there. But if she had been there, theoretically, she would have been there in Rome, and she would have been Pope from 855 to 857, CE. No, she wasn’t there. People thought she was for a long time, and now people know she isn’t, but they like to think that she is. Anyway, it is quite confusing. So we will explain to you all about Pope Joan. Pope Joan, so theoretically, being around, you know, early Middle Ages. We don’t hear about her. There’s nothing in writing about her until 1250 when Jean de Mailly, who was a Dominican who was writing at Metz. He was writing a chronicle of the Diocese of Metz, and the chronicle included Pope Joan on account of because that was where she apparently was from, if she had been from any place, which she wasn’t. But it’s the first written evidence, and she’s in the chronicle because of being connected to Metz. De Mailly says that she became Pope in 1099, having disguised herself as a man and performing very well in the church ranks and going up and up and up and becoming a cardinal and then finally becoming a pope. But de Mailly says that she got pregnant. He doesn’t say by whom. We don’t know. She just kind of got pregnant, but we don’t think it was like the Virgin Mary, no, no, because she’s not good enough to be like that. She hid her pregnancy for a long time. But unfortunately, she gave birth whilst she was trying to get on a horse for a little pageant. So the people tied her to the horse and dragged her around and then stoned her to death, and they buried her under a stone which said, Petre, Pater Patrum, Papisse Prodito Partum–in other words, oh Peter, father of fathers, betray the child bearing of the woman Pope. Okay, all right. But it’s not de Mailly’s work that got traction. That came a little later. Stephen of Bourbon, who was a French Dominican, wrote her story into his work, De septem donis Spiritus Sancti, the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost. His version then got retold and in other works dating from 13th century. Later on, in the 13th century, Martin of Opava wrote the Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatorum, the chronicle of the popes and the emperors. He was a 13th century Dominican from Poland. You notice this has all been Dominicans so far. It was Dominican, Dominican, Dominican. They were very interested in Pope Joan. In his version–this is the version that really, really gets going–he dates Joan’s papacy to the ninth century, specifically in between Pope Leo the fourth and Pope Benedict the third. So he not only takes it further back than our first writer did, he puts it into a very specific place so that you could actually go and figure out where this was in the calendar. And he gives her a name. That’s the first time she’s named Johan Anglicus, or John of Mains. And we get the backstory. So here’s the backstory. If you were playing on her on stage, you would want to know what the backstory is, so you could, like, interpret her. So here’s what it is. Johanna had a lover– natch, of course she had a lover–and he took her to Athens. He was a Benedictine monk. He was not Dominican, haha. So, you know, he was much more badly behaved, apparently, according to, you know, if you’re a Dominican. He made her dress like a man, so nobody would suspect impropriety and hanky panky and whatnot. While she was in Athens, she studied all sorts of things. And she was just brilliant. So she learned everything she could at Athens, and then she went to Rome to learn some more, because there was more stuff that you could learn but she couldn’t learn it in Athens, she had to go to Rome. So she did, and she attracted all sorts of students. She was like a great teacher. She’s like Peter Abelard. She was just teaching people all the time. She was marvelous. And she learned lots more things. But unfortunately, the things that she learned did not include knowing how long babies take to grow in the womb. So when she got pregnant by the Benedictine lover who had followed her to Rome, she did not know that she was about to give birth during a papal procession, and she did, and she died in childbirth. We are not told in this version what happened to the child, but it took place on the Via Sacra in between the Coliseum and St Clements, and after that, that little piece of road was called Shunned street for a while. The details in this version give it a lot of credence. It got repeated over and over, and papal processions for quite some time didn’t go down that street, you know, because it was the Shunned Street, which also gives credence to the story. So it kind of keeps getting more and more reified. ‘This is a thing that really happened.’ So there you are. Pope Joan was a real thing. By the way, there was another version of the story later in which Pope Joan did not die in childbirth, though they deposed her, naturally. She was not Pope anymore, and she was made to do years and years and years of penance. I wish I knew what it was, but I don’t. I figure that is probably bigger than repeating Hail Marys and Our Fathers, but I don’t know what it was. When she died, she got buried in the cathedral, and the baby grew up to be the Bishop of Ostia. Okay, so that was a version, but that doesn’t really get very far. I like that version a lot, in which Pope Joan kind of gets redeemed somewhere. It’s like, she’s not really horrible. But it’s really a kind of movement from they tie her behind a horse and then stone her to death, to she dies in childbirth and they bury her, to, she has the child and then the child grows up and then later she gets buried in the cathedral. You can see there’s a lot of change over the centuries. So these versions, they get kind of easier on her over the centuries of retelling. Throughout the Middle Ages, this story was accepted as true. This is simply a fact about the church as far as they’re concerned, over and over and over. It was used in sermons because Joan was a really, really good moral exemplar of something–maybe don’t lie to the church, or, you know, don’t wear clothes belonging to a different gender. That got Joan of Arc in trouble too. Don’t be ignorant of human bodily functions, or maybe even don’t be female. I don’t know.  Make sure that you’re clear on human bodily functions. That’s my favorite moral. But I kind of think they weren’t actually pushing that. It all began to fall apart in the late 1500s . Oh, and by the way, before we get to the late 1500s–Michelle reminded me of this–after the Catholic Church had been using Joan as this exemplar of dreadfulness, don’t do this in the Catholic Church, the Protestants then took it up. Jan Hus, for instance, refers to her–he calls her Agnes–because it was proof of how godawful the Catholic Church was. But they believed it also as being a true story. Nevertheless. Okay, we get to the late 1500s. Floribunda Raymond from France in the last half of the 16th century–he was a jurist and an antiquarian, in other words, not a dominican monk, or even or even a Hussite–he was a jurist and an antiquarian, and he was used to looking at evidence. Gonna have a little moment here where we think about looking at evidence. Let’s all do that. Let’s all make a little pact, you know, for the rest of our lives, especially in the next few years, that we’re going to look at evidence and we’re going to think logically. Let’s go for that. At any rate, he did. In 1587–this was the popular story of Joan the Pope–he wrote that the whole thing was a myth, and that all those details that made it look so real had gotten added later–which is true, they had–and the church itself, a few years after this, Pope Clement the eighth declared the story untrue. Art depicting Joan started getting destroyed, and the story was told less. You know, she went kind of down in favor for a while after even the Catholic Church said, No we she wasn’t really there. In the centuries that followed, the story got taken apart more and more. For instance, the timeline is a real problem. Joan became, instead of a source of moral teachings, a kind of useful figure for anti Catholics to use in various ways. Where we stand now, okay, here’s where we are. Joan was often presumed to actually be Pope John the eighth, but he was Pope from 872 to 882, after the dates that have been given to Joan by Martin of Opava, and she couldn’t have ruled in between Pope Benedict the third, and Pope Leo the fourth, which is also rooted about because Leo’s election followed Benedict’s Pepsi almost immediately, there wasn’t time for her to have even a week to last two years. Also, there were critics of the papacy during the ninth century, when she theoretically was being there, and none of them mention her, and she would have been a great example of the problems with the papacy that those Catholics at that time were addressing so and she wasn’t there, and there was a Protestant historian, David Blondell, a Frenchman, writing in the mid 17th century. So a little further on, who considered Joan to be a satire of Pope John the ninth you see, we’re all over the place here. And in general, there is almost entirely a complete consensus amongst historians that she was not there. However, this is from 2018 which is not that far away. There was an adjunct academic at Flinders University who believes that Joan existed and simply got excised out of the documents and whatnot. Some of the evidence survives in coins, but I don’t find it compelling. I don’t find this compelling at all. I mean, because for one thing, it’s not like the only kinds of things that are being written about popes or being written in Rome? No, no, they’re written all throughout Europe. And so, what? So there is a pope Joan, and we’re going to get rid of the evidence of her, and we go to every single archive, everything, every single monastery or any kind of library throughout Europe, and make sure that nobody has written down her name? I’m not gone buying this.

Michelle Butler  11:43 

I agree with you. I think that the people who want to argue this do not have a good conception of exactly how much paperwork existed.

Anne Brannen  11:52 

So much paperwork. There really is. We don’t read it much a lot of times. There’s a lot of stuff in the archives that nobody remembers what it is anymore and hasn’t got it cataloged, because you have to pay people to catalog things, and where is the money? There’s not a bunch. No, no, no, there’s no Pope Joan. She wasn’t there. So nowadays we all know that she wasn’t there. I see very, very few web pages–Michelle is going to talk about art, the novels and the plays and whatnot–but I see very few web pages purporting to talk about Pope Joan, who give her as a reality. They talk about her as a legend within the page, but the title will be pope Joan, female Pope of the Middle Ages. It really makes it look like she was there. So that’s kind of confusing. And indeed, encyclopedia.com calls her possibly real, possibly fictitious. No, she is not possibly fictitious. She is fictitious. That is my explanation of Pope, Joan, what the hell and Michelle will now take it into the fields of art. Go, Michelle, go.

Michelle Butler  12:57 

I have two history things to throw in before we move on to art.

Anne Brannen  13:00 

Yay, yay.

Michelle Butler  13:01 

She also got cited in Walter Brutes heresy trial. He was a Lollard. In 1391–

Anne Brannen  13:07 

Oh, my God, I didn’t see that.

Michelle Butler  13:09 

He was doing the same thing that Jan Hus was doing. So that’s sort of cool, because we do have this connection with crime and law and stuff, and that’s our purported purpose. So that’s kind of cool.

Anne Brannen  13:20 

There was a crime and it was heresy. Somebody mentioned Pope Joan. Ta-da-da.

Michelle Butler  13:24 

I think that’s fascinating, that you have these , from point of view of the Catholics, heretics saying, ‘but look over here. Look at this.’ And I found the piece of the legend that grows up afterwards–I actually do find web pages that claim this is true, I found some conspiracy theorists who want to claim that Pope Joan is true. I found a couple of blogs, and there was a fair number of conspiracy theorists on YouTube who really are all into the idea that, yes, somebody did go around and totally excise all these records because there’s this assumption…people who aren’t medievalists, not unreasonably, assume that, because this is so long ago, we don’t have a lot of paperwork, and it was simply not true. I mean, these guys, once they got writing, they were all over it. They embraced it and wrote everything down. But the other piece of the legend that is–I mean, I thought Brian was gonna laugh so hard, we were gonna have car accident, I was reading this to him–that a pope could not be made…he had to sit on the chair with a U that was open–did you run into this?–after Pope Joan, they’ve learned their lesson. It absolutely has to be a man and somebody has to check. So the Pope has to sit on the chair that probably, in reality, was a Roman birthing chair, but it was hanging around the Vatican. And so this legend grew up around it, this connected to the Pope Joan, that he has to sit on it, and some poor soul has to reach under there and…hold on. I’m gonna pull up the actual what the he has to do. He had to reach out under there and check to see if he has testicles, and say, testiculos habet et bene pendentes–he has testicles and they hang well. I mean, this is fabulous.

Yeah, I do know about that part. And no, it’s not true. That’s not true.

Of course it’s not true. It’s not true. But it’s kind of shame flute-y in this way that, hey, there’s an object, that means it must be true. The fact that there’s this object, therefore the story we’re telling about, it must be true.

Anne Brannen  15:30 

There’s an object which can be interpreted in this way.

Michelle Butler  15:33 

Yes. Oh, my goodness gracious.

Anne Brannen  15:37 

It’s a fruitful little story, isn’t it?

Michelle Butler  15:41 

This is so popular for so so long, so so long. There’s the medieval tellings of it, which are not really retellings, it’s just sort of passing it down over the course of the Middle Ages. You have an interregnum, say, during the Enlightenment, where everybody is like, oh my god, I was so embarrassed by everything medieval. Then you hit the 19th century, and it’s Katie bar the door.

Anne Brannen  16:07 

So some of the works that you’ve got come from the 19th century.

Michelle Butler  16:10 

Lordy my goodness. Once you hit the 19th century, it is a solid stream up until the present day. What’s fascinating about this is that it’s in different genres and different languages. This is a story that gets retold in different languages and that continues into now. There are plays. I’m just gonna list a few, because trying to tell you all of them is way too many. There’s a play in 1813 by a German playwright. You have 1982–I mean, you have other ones in there–but Carol Churchill’s Top Girls, it’s not a play about her. It’s one where she shows up.

Anne Brannen  16:49 

It is true. She’s in Top Girls.

Michelle Butler  16:51 

There is a play from 1996. There was a play in 2019 done in Malta.

Anne Brannen  16:56 

Wow.

Michelle Butler  16:58 

Isn’t that wild? There are novels. 1866 , that one’s particularly interesting because Mark Twain liked it. It’s a novel by a Greek novelist. Mark Twain liked it, which makes me want to smack him, because he hated Jane Austen. What in the actual hell.

Anne Brannen  17:15 

But, you know, he revered Joan of Arc. Mark Twain was an interesting man. I just will say that.

Michelle Butler  17:20 

He not only disliked Jane Austen, he disliked her so much that he said in a letter that he wanted to dig her up just to beat her to death with her own femur, which is over the top.

Anne Brannen  17:30 

It is over the top, I will agree.

Michelle Butler  17:31 

What is it wrong with you?

Anne Brannen  17:32 

Well, he’s Mark Twain. You know, there’s only one of them, really.

Michelle Butler  17:38 

There are novels in 1829, 1909, 1912, 1926, two in 2005, and brand new one that came out last year in 2024.

Anne Brannen  17:49 

Oh, my God.

Michelle Butler  17:50 

The one that Mark Twain liked was the inspiration for a 1907 operetta. It was translated kind of loosely into English in 1954 by Lawrence Durrell.

Anne Brannen  18:04 

No!

Michelle Butler  18:05 

Yes.

Anne Brannen  18:06 

Durrell did that?

Michelle Butler  18:08 

Durrell.

Anne Brannen  18:12 

Why did Durrell do that? Oh, I’m gonna have to go find that.

Michelle Butler  18:16 

There are movies. There are movies. More than one.

Anne Brannen  18:20 

Did you get to look at any of them?

Michelle Butler  18:22 

I watched the trailers for all of them. There’s one from 1972 in Spanish. Part of what I think is fascinating is the range of languages in which the story continues to be retold into the 20th century. Because this isn’t true with the Arthurian legend. By and large, the Arthurian legend became…in post medieval, it became strictly–it had been a pan European legend in the Middle Ages, but as we get past that, as we get post medieval, it becomes more or less an English legend. We think about it as being an English legend. They’re not really still doing historical novels in German about Arthur. As far as I know, there isn’t a German equivalent of Alfred Lord Tennyson doing the Idylls of the King.

Anne Brannen  19:11 

Or Walter Scott. That’s what I want to know. Did Walter Scott write anything about Pope Joan? I want to know this.

Michelle Butler  19:18 

Holy cow. That would be fascinating. It didn’t come up, and I think it would have, if he had, but there’s a lot. There’s just a lot. Olivia de Havilland was in this film. She had a small part in this film.

Anne Brannen  19:32 

Oh, okay, so she’s not Pope Joan.

Michelle Butler  19:34 

She’s not. It’s 1972 so it’s later in her career. Although she lives forever, she lives to be like 103.

Anne Brannen  19:41 

Yeah, she does.

Michelle Butler  19:41 

Good for her. I mean, she was amazing. There is a 2009 movie in German with some big names in it. This was based on a 1996 novel. John Goodman is in it.

Anne Brannen  19:57 

Doing what?

Michelle Butler  19:58 

He’s playing a pope. So he may be a predecessor Pope. I watched the trailer, but it was in German, so I was doing my best. Iain Glen was in it. Iain Glen was in Game of Thrones. He was the guy who follows Daenerys around moment. I’m not remembering that character’s name. David Wenham, who played Faramir in Lord of the Rings is in it. So it’s not this kind of indie project over there. This is a big project. It’s being done in German, but it’s being done with a cast of German actors, and apparently, whatever English and American actors you can talk into participating. There is a 2016 movie in French.

Anne Brannen  20:39 

Huh.

Michelle Butler  20:39 

Isn’t that wild?

Anne Brannen  20:41 

I would like to see that.

Michelle Butler  20:42 

Here is quite possibly my favorite piece. There are three musicals.

Anne Brannen  20:49 

Why have we not seen these?

Three, count them, three musicals. They’re all fairly recent. There’s one in German. There’s another one that I apparently forgot to put in my notes, but I know that I found three of them because they have different names. There is a fascinating, fascinating one that is theoretically in process. It’s one of these things where they’ve listed it and said, This is our plan. And I can’t find anything that suggests it’s gone further, but I kind of hope it does, because their plan is fascinating. It’s called The Female Pope, and it’s from 2022. They have some samples of the music they’re planning. They’ve got a cross-media plan for it. It’s gonna have a video game connected to it. It’s gonna have a full length animated feature that is the musical. So it’s an animated musical. But actually, I quite liked the music to it, to be honest. But, but, but, but…okay.I guess if you can do a musical about the cadaver Synod, which we also found…

That’s true. The Cadaver Synod really does not seem like musical material.

Michelle Butler  22:02 

In the more contemporary musicals…I think one of the reasons this story gets retold is that it can be whatever you need it to be. So it’s getting retold now as either a woman determined to have education, no matter what, a woman who does sketchy things for love, or a little bit of both. So you can have it be a lot of things. Here is one that absolutely floored me to read about it, because I was in Pittsburgh when this was happening, and I don’t remember it. There was a dance opera written for the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble and performed by Dance Alloy in 2009. I would have been in Pittsburgh at that time, and I don’t remember this happening.

Anne Brannen  22:46 

I don’t remember this either.

Michelle Butler  22:48 

I had two very small children at that point, so I barely remember 2009 in general.

Anne Brannen  22:53 

Yeah, right. I don’t remember what I was doing. So I’m no help here at all.

Michelle Butler  22:58 

One was five and one was three, and I remember practically nothing of that time period, but I wish I had known about it, because, again, this is fascinating, that you have a dance opera in 2009 being made about Pope Joan. Fascinating. Fascinating, fascinating. We talked a little bit earlier about the plethora of stuff on YouTube. I’m not even going to give you links, because there’s so much. Feel free to just go type it into YouTube yourself. YouTube is all over this. There are some videos, the conspiracy theorists claiming it’s true but it was covered up. There’s a whole bunch of them that took take the approach that we saw with the chasity belts, of wanting to have their cake and eat it too. This isn’t real, but a whole lot of people believed it, so I’m going to repeat all that stuff.

Anne Brannen  23:43 

We’re not going to tell you how we know it’s not real. We’re just going to tell you the story some more.

Michelle Butler  23:49 

It’s just like with the chastity belts, where because you end up repeating it, you reinforce it rather than debunk it. This giant list that exists does not even take into account works that elude the legend or use it as inspiration without it being a retelling. For example, I just recently read the first book in the Matthew Shardlake mystery series, and the plot for that first book is Pope Joan, but retold so it’s not her, it’s another young woman who has disguised herself as a man–she’s so much smarter than her dullard brother. So in that version of events, the brother helps her with the deception because he knows that he’s not getting anywhere without her to take his tests for him. Sorry, this is a spoiler for the book, but it’s been out for like 20 years, she ends up being the killer because somebody finds out. Our main character is really conflicted because he feels for her. Well, you can’t be killing people. I’m sorry, but he feels for the desire for education and that this was her only way to do it and that it was a crappy thing for somebody to be trying to blackmail her about it.

Anne Brannen  25:12 

Sometimes you just have to kill people so you can get your education. I understand that, yeah. But really it’s a bridge too far.

Michelle Butler  25:20 

I will tell you, relatedly, that the Shardlake series is really good.

Anne Brannen  25:23 

Thank you.

Michelle Butler  25:24 

It’s good to know going into it that it is about the dissolution of the monasteries, because Shardlake is a lawyer who works for Cromwell. I found it to be a little rough listening, as a medievalist, to ‘and then we destroyed this, and then we destroyed this, and then we pulled the wall down, and then we took this in, and that got melted down.’ That was really hard.

Anne Brannen  25:45 

Because it actually did happen, and it’s not good, though.

Michelle Butler  25:48 

It’s meticulously researched. I loved it a lot, and I was surprised to not find it in the list. But of course, if you start going into the things that take it and do something else with it, you’ll never, ever get done listing things, because it’s such a juicy story. You know, you can do lots and lots of stuff with it. Oh, my goodness gracious. This was quite the thing.

Anne Brannen  26:10 

What do you recommend we go and look at first?

Michelle Butler  26:12 

Other than Matthew Shardlake, who I think is really delightful and has the benefit of the author having died, so, you know there’s only seven books and there’s not gonna more.

Anne Brannen  26:22 

Not going to have to wait for them to finish them instead of drinking coffee in Santa Fe.

Michelle Butler  26:26 

Yeah, he’s not cranking out 20 more. And it is being filmed. It’s being made into a television show starring Sean Bean, which is awesome.

Anne Brannen  26:35 

I love him. I think, in his private life, he’s not really wonderful, but I just love his stuff. I once put together a collection of movies in which he does not die. It was fun.

Michelle Butler  26:45 

I found the musicals to be fascinating. The movies are really interesting too. But again, they are ones in Spanish, ones in German, ones in French. So there was a limit to how much I could find out about it, but the 2009 one has a nice trailer on IMDb. Part of what’s fascinating about them is that 1972 versus 2009, it’s a really clear example of how our understanding of what it means to show a realistic picture of the Middle Ages changes, and that’s always really fascinating to see. You can do this, of course, with all of the Robin Hood movies. You can just follow it and watch 20th century conventions of realism change.

Anne Brannen  27:32 

The Robin Hood arc of the 20th century. Yep.

Michelle Butler  27:34 

These two, since they’re so far apart, provide a really nice point A, point B. Everything dark and muddy in 2009, everything bright and shiny in 1972. Of course, no world is either one of those things. It’s not either one or the other. So I definitely preferred digging into the musicals and the movies over  the novels, partially, because there’s just so many novels. Oh my goodness. There’s just so many.

Anne Brannen  28:01 

That’s amazing. So what are you going to do? You’re not going to give us links to everything. What are you going to do?

Michelle Butler  28:06 

Wikipedia has a pretty nice list of the novels, so I don’t need to duplicate that. The musicals that I found are not on Wikipedia at all. So I guess if I was a less busy person, I would go over and edit that page and add those things. None of those are in there.

Anne Brannen  28:26 

That way madness lies, editing Wikipedia.

Michelle Butler  28:29 

I once spent some time trying to edit Wikipedia pages about medieval drama because it was all wrong and out of date, and people changed it back because they’re like, that can’t be right. That’s not what Glynne Wickham said.

Anne Brannen  28:43 

God, yeah. I forget who it is that went in there and cleaned it up, but that got off. That’s okay. Now where it was the last time I looked. Pope Joan.

Michelle Butler  28:52 

The story that can be everything to everybody, and is such an interesting parallel with Joan of Arc, who is real.

Anne Brannen  29:01 

We were talking about this a little, but explain to our audience how it is you’re making this connection.

Michelle Butler  29:06 

I find them interesting to put together because there’s so much overlap in what is supposed to have happened. But Joan of Arc is real. She did actually disguise herself as a man. She did actually have this horrific death.

Anne Brannen  29:25 

She did actually do things that were not supposed to be done by women, yes.

Michelle Butler  29:29 

And that is a real thing, and they reacted exactly as badly as what you would expect, because it was all tied up in the politics. It would have been interesting to know how that would have been handled if she hadn’t been tied up in the politics. But of course, she wouldn’t have been able to do it if she hadn’t been tied up in the politics, because France would not have gone for this unless they were desperate.

Anne Brannen  29:50 

Right. The whole point was that she was involved in the politics.

Michelle Butler  29:53 

I just think it’s really fascinating that you have these two, and Pope Joan predates, as a story, predates Joan of Arc, but you have these two stories about a woman named Joan coming out of the Middle Ages that have this overlap, and one is absolutely true and one is absolutely false.

Anne Brannen  30:11 

And both of them end up with stories that ring down, all the way down through–

Michelle Butler  30:14 

Oh hugely influential, absolutely.

Anne Brannen  30:18 

 I agree.

Michelle Butler  30:18 

I wonder, somebody who’s not me, could probably do a really interesting study, once both of these stories exist, about the ways in which they influence each other, because I can’t imagine that they don’t. I suspect they’re circling each other, right? Because you have Joan of Arc claiming to be a virgin and then them wanting to say, Well, clearly you’re not, and that’s what’s involved also in the Pope Joan story. So I suspect somebody could do a really nice book about that, but it’s not going to be me.

Anne Brannen  30:50 

No. But any graduate students who might be listening to things or in the future they might think about this as stuff to look at.

Michelle Butler  30:57 

If you write the paper or the book, do send us a link, because I would like to read it.

Anne Brannen  31:01 

We’d love to know.

Michelle Butler  31:01 

I can’t actually swear that that book doesn’t exist. Because I didn’t actually search for that because I wasn’t thinking about that connection until we were talking about it here. So my bad if the book already exists.

Anne Brannen  31:12 

While we were talking, I did look up to see if Walter Scott had done anything on Pope Joan. He didn’t. I would have loved that. That would have been fun, would it? I would have yet enough reason to be annoyed at him.

Michelle Butler  31:22 

That would have been very interesting, because it was back in the cultural conversation by then.

Anne Brannen  31:28 

Oh yeah, oh yeah. And he was all about–

Michelle Butler  31:30 

I don’t know that Dumas did, but it wouldn’t have surprised me the slightest bit if one of the Dumas had.

Anne Brannen  31:36 

Yeah, that was right up their alley, one or both. Well, that is our explanation of Pope Joan. She wasn’t there. And the next time that you hear from us, we will be going to Scotland. What century is this, Michelle?

Michelle Butler  31:49 

11th.

Anne Brannen  31:49 

Going to Scotland, the 11th century, so that we can talk about the murder of King Duncan, which actually did happen, and was the source for Macbeth, which didn’t mostly happen, at least not in that way, but, but, but, but there was King Duncan and he did get murdered. So we’ll be doing that now. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. We can be found on Spotify and Apple podcast and any place where the podcasts are hanging out. We have a website at truecrimemedieval.com, where you can find links to the podcast and the transcriptions and the show notes, and there’s an index where you can look things up. It’s arranged kind of like in the way my brain works, and so you kind of have to skim on through it and find things, but they’re in there. So you can figure out where stuff is, and you can leave comments. We love that, and you can get a hold of us, and we’d love to hear from you. If you have any medieval crimes which we haven’t covered, you can go check in the index and if you think we might not have heard of it, please let us know. Maybe they’re on our list. Maybe not. Happy April Fool’s Day. Bye.

Michelle Butler  32:57 

Bye.

107. Church Sanctuary in the Middle Ages

Anne Brannen  0:25 

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:34 

And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:38 

Today we are not focusing actually on a crime. We’re focusing on sanctuary, because Michelle and I have been thinking about sanctuary and wondering about sanctuary. You know, what exactly was it? How real is it? Yada yada. So we thought we would look some things up and think about it and do research. And so we did, and as usual, we have been focusing on two different things, because that’s how we are. Because really, Michelle, if we were always doing the same thing, that would not be working well, would it, for the podcast?

Michelle Butler  1:07 

No, no, that would be boring.

Anne Brannen  1:09 

Our two different views of the same thing. What we’re talking about is church sanctuary in the Middle Ages. How did it work? Did it work? But sanctuary is really a very big topic. The word sanctuary itself, when we’re using it specifically these days, means the area in the church that’s around the altar, that’s the sanctuary. We don’t say, it is sanctuary. We say the sanctuary. And so that’s what that is. The history of sanctuary, getting sanctuary, getting getting to a safe place, church or no, really way predates the Middle Ages and hasn’t stopped yet. It’s a very common sort of notion. There were cities of refuge in the Old Testament. There are Native people in the new world–during the invasions, the European invasions of the new world, different nations would let people of other nations in, you know, when they were in trouble because of the English or French or Spanish. And churches still offer sanctuary, though it’s by tradition and no longer by law. I’m going to get to that because I have some stuff about the law. And countries accept political refugees and give them sanctuary. Poland, for instance, when Ukraine was invaded, Poland really stepped up. A lot of places in Europe did, Poland above all, taking care of people, finding them places to live, because you can’t just let them over the border. I mean, you know, they’re humans, they’re going to need to live someplace and eat and take care of their kids. If you’re going to be a country giving sanctuary, you really need to help beyond just opening the border. So it’s much more than a medieval concept. But when we say sanctuary, we tend to be thinking about the Middle Ages. So we’re going to focus on medieval sanctuary, but I’ve got a bunch of things to say about sanctuary, which is not in the Middle Ages, because context. I would love the context. But in the main, we know from Gregory of Tours, who was writing in France in the late sixth century, that sanctuary existed, but it wasn’t always respected. A bit later, about 600 Common Era, Athelstan in England made laws–this is the first that we know of–concerning sanctuary. I’m going to read you a little bit of Athelstan’s laws about sanctuary. Quote, “We declared in the council at Thundersfield that if any thief or robber fled to the king or to any church or to the bishop, he should have a respite of nine days, and if he flees to an alderman or an abbot or a thane, he shall have a respite of three days. If anyone slays him within that period of respite, he shall pay as compensation, and the protection of him to whom the thief has fled, or clear himself with the support of 11 others” –so, 11 other people who come and say, no, he’s okay, he’s good, “–that he was not–” this is what you need to prove if you’re going to slay anybody who’s in the middle of respite “–that he was not aware that the privilege of sanctuary had been obtained.” So you’ve got to have 11 people who will swear that you did not know that the thief that was hanging out at the altar was in sanctuary. I wish I could tell you how often this happened, but I can’t.

Michelle Butler  4:25 

I’m pretty sure you and I have run into a case before where they attempted to take sanctuary and the church just got burnt down. Is this ringing a bell for you?

Anne Brannen  4:35 

Well, we’ve had, for instance, in the war with the Vikings at–was it at Oxford? It wasn’t Oxford.

Michelle Butler  4:41 

I think so. I think I think it was.

Anne Brannen  4:43 

That’s what you’re thinking of? So people, including women and children, took refuge in the church, and the Vikings burnt it down over their heads. And you remember the Jews in York took refuge in the tower, and–

Michelle Butler  4:57 

Yes.

Anne Brannen  4:57 

And the people of York burnt it down. So, yeah, this happened a lot. The laws of sanctuary got more involved. After the 12th century in England, there was sanctuary in churches licensed by the king, and there was a sort of lesser sanctuary in other churches. In the 15th century in England, during the Cousins War–which many of you will think of as the War of the Roses, but I don’t–during the Cousins War, battle losers on either side who couldn’t get to safety would seek sanctuary in churches but this didn’t always work. Lovely example. In 1471 after the Battle of Tewkesbury, four Lancastrian knights took refuge in a church, where Edward, the king, carrying his sword, was about to follow in, which you’re not supposed to do. You’re not supposed to be taking your arms into churches, although people did often. We’ve had several instances of people getting murdered in churches. He was stopped by the priest because they were in the middle of mass, and the priest stopped him and caused him to agree to pardon the knights. So Edward agreed, and the knights left the church, and then Edward captured and executed them. So that really didn’t help much. Actually, I think they should have stayed. On the other hand, his queen, Elizabeth Woodville, twice successfully sought sanctuary at Westminster Abbey, because you could take sanctuary not just because you were a criminal, but because you had been accused of being a criminal, or because you were in danger. Hence everybody going into the churches and getting burnt down over their heads. First in 1470 when she and her children were in London and Edward was off someplace, and then he briefly was not king, so she went in for sanctuary. In 1471 he was restored to the throne. So she came out. By that time, Elizabeth had given birth to her son, Edward, the future of King Edward the fifth, I guess, although he didn’t get crowned, as we know. She’d given birth to him at Westminster Abbey before she left. Then in 1483 Edward the fourth died. That would be the one who killed the knights at Tewkesbury. Elizabeth perceived herself to be in danger on account of being enormously unpopular. Please see our earlier podcast, one of our first ones, on the Cousins War. So she went into sanctuary again. She was really, really comfortable–she took a lot of furniture and clothes with her, so much so that they had to, the workmen, had to knock holes in the walls to get everything in, you know, in a timely sort of fashion. And she had taken her youngest son at that time, and not just her daughters but her youngest son, Richard, but she was talked into letting him leave sanctuary to go to his brother’s supposed crowning, which never happened, and both boys disappeared. That’s the princes in the tower. We don’t actually know what happened to them, although Michelle and I have very strong opinions, but she agreed to leave in 1484 when Richard the Third swore in front of a whole lot of spiritual and political leaders that not only would he not hurt her or her daughters, but he would marry the daughters off to gentlemen and give them doweries, and Elizabeth would get 700 marks a year and an attendant. So she came out of sanctuary, and she stayed at court until 1487. At that point, she retired to a religious life at Bermondsey Abbey. But she didn’t have to. Anyway, so successful, unsuccessful–sanctuary could go either way. But the first time that sanctuary was violated that we know of at Westminster Abbey itself was in 1378. This is a story I like, Michelle, because John of Gaunt is in it. It is in 1378, when Frank De Hall and John Shakel captured a Spanish count who was, unfortunately for them, a friend of John of Gaunt’s. So he told them to give up their captive, and they didn’t. He had them in prison in the tower, because he was John of Gaunt. But they escaped, and they got to Westminster, but the Constable of the tower and Sir Ralph de Ferrers and about 50 or so other men chased them into the abbey at high mass and attacked them, attacked the two men with swords. Shakels got away, but the company chased Hall all around the choir, hacking at them with their swords, and finally, he died in front of the prior’schair. All right.

Anne Brannen  5:49 

That. That. Oh, man.

Anne Brannen  7:39 

Oh, a servant and a monk got killed too. I forgot to give you that. So they were just hacking around. They were waving swords, and some people got in the way. That was it.

Michelle Butler  9:11 

I have a friend who keeps insisting on posting a meme–you’ve probably seen this, it’s the one that’s black and white, and it’s all about ‘there is a time in the past where religion dominated everything and nobody believed in science, and it was called the Dark Ages.’ And every time I feel like I have to say this is not true. But now I feel like I need a list of every time somebody got murdered in a church so that we can be like no, the church wished it had the kind of power you’re ascribing to it.

Anne Brannen  10:13 

And occasionally it did. There were some powerful pieces of it, you know, here and there. But this wasn’t it.

Michelle Butler  10:21 

This just sounds like a farce. Chasing some dude around. Oh, oh my lord. I had never heard of that.

Anne Brannen  6:52 

I thought you’d like it because it had John of Gaunt. have gone. So anyway, the whole thing was really out of hand, and Hall was obviously a martyr to the violation of the Abbey. So they buried him in the wall, you know, which is unusual, with an inscription and a brass thing that with an epitaph on it, and which apparently existed until the 18th century. They closed the abbey for four months because of the desecration, and the members of parliament didn’t have sittings there because of the desecration, and a couple of the hacking guys got excommunicated. All right.

Michelle Butler  10:30 

But nothing happened to John of Gaunt, because he’s John of Gaunt.

Anne Brannen  10:37 

He’s John of Gaunt. Nothing’s gonna happen. Well, there was the time actually, that his house got burnt down during the peasants revolt, but you know, mostly John of Gaunt got away with stuff. The forms of sanctuary differ at various times and in various places. In some churches, you had to get to the altar. In others, you had to get your hand on the door knocker. In others, you just had to get to the premises. And the time you could stay there. It had been nine days under Athelstan. It became 40 days, because that’s a very sacred church number. But for innocents who were seeking refuge, as, for instance, Elizabeth Woodville, if you just needed help, because people were after you, or you thought they were after you. Well, I mean, by that time, Richard had already killed her brother, right? He’d already taken out some Woodvilles, I think, when she sought sanctuary. Do you remember?

Michelle Butler  12:09 

Yeah, the wood fills were not popular because they were upstarts.

Anne Brannen  12:16 

Yeah, though Anthony was actually really great. I’m sorry that he was part of this whole thing. They didn’t have a time limitation. So you could stay there like forever, I guess. Though, in reality, the churchmen would get really tired of feeding you, you know, and so they might try to get you out. At the end of that time, at the end of the 40 days. Let’s assume you’re a criminal. At the end of the 40 days, if you hadn’t been pardoned already–and that was actually it was unusual to get pardoned–you had to abjure the realm. That is, you had to go into exile. And you did this–I always wondered about this, so I was glad to find this out. You didn’t just leave the church where then people hacked you down. No, no, you didn’t do this by just leaving. There was a ceremony in front of the community. So everybody gets to come and you have to confess the crime to the coroner. Here’s the form as it existed in 1594 in London. We have this written down. So here we have quote–I’m the criminal. “This hear thou, sir coroner, that I [name entered] of [place entered] am a [crime entered], and because I have done such evils in this land, I do abjure the land of our lord, the king, and shall haste me towards the port of nearest port [enter that here] and that I shall not go out of the highway. And if I do, I will that I be taken as a robber and a felon of our lord the king, and that at such place I shall diligently seek for passage–”  that would be the port. Now we’re getting to the port, “–and then I will stay there but one flood and ebb if I can have passage. And unless I have it in such place, I will go every day to the sea up to my knees, a saying to pass over. And unless I can do this within 40 days, I will put myself at the church as a robber and a felon of our lord the king. So help me, God and His Holy judgment.” So in other words, you would have to seek sanctuary again after you’d been standing in the sea for a while. Okay, after you say all this stuff, the constables of the parishes that you would have to travel through would accompany you to make sure you went on through and so that you got to the port. Although many of these people who are supposedly being accompanied all the way to the port where they’re going to stand in the sea and then go someplace actually escaped and became outlaws in the greenwoods, joined outlaw bands because that also was a possibility, although there wasn’t a legal form for it, because it was illegal. So there you go. Church sanctuary did exist in the Middle Ages. Yes, it did. This is not one of our April Fool’s things where we tell you that there were no chastity belts and there was no  droit de seigneur, all those kinds of things. No, there was sanctuary in the Middle Ages, both religious and secular, and there were laws about it that governed it. Often people who claim sanctuary were safe, and often they weren’t. By the Reformation, the entity of church sanctuary had pretty much disappeared in England and was gone in the rest of Europe by the end of the 18th century, at least as far as sanctuary for criminals, though sanctuary exists still, and what I was thinking about was embassies. Embassies are a really good example of sanctuary. Before that, it was the houses of ambassadors. For a long time, they would be places where, let’s say that you are traveling, you’re in a different country, the ambassador, now the Embassy, of your country, you can get there and say, Help. Help. Like, I lost my passport or robbers are coming after me, or I have become politically problematic. And so you go to the embassy. They’re sanctuary, although they don’t work either all the time. Sometimes people don’t let you in, if it’s not actually your embassy. Also sometimes other people come and burn them down over your heads.

Michelle Butler  16:17 

Or perhaps throw you out a window.

Anne Brannen  16:18 

Ah, yes, there’s the defenestration. That’s always a possibility. As with church sanctuary, embassy sanctuary isn’t impregnable. If your country has become a target, for instance, your embassy isn’t safe. As for instance, in 1979 when the US Embassy in Tehran was stormed and 52 Americans were taken hostage, but six other Americans managed to escape and get to the Canadian Embassy, and they let them in and took care of them, and they didn’t let anybody know they were there, except somehow they got word to America. At any rate, they were there, and they were finally gotten out of Iran in a lovely movie called Argo. Nowadays, church sanctuary is still thought of as a tradition, though it seldom has legal backing. So many people have the idea that if you need to, you can run into a church and go to the altar and you’ll be safe. Which maybe, yes, maybe no. There’s a church law site that I found which lays this out. The church is not a valid sanctuary against arrest, and this includes immigration enforcement. There’s no legal religious sanctuary, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, in America has been reluctant to enter churches to arrest undocumented immigrants because it looks bad. It’s supremely tacky to go in with all your weaponry and those things they wear make them look kind of like Darth Vader’s crew, to come on in and drag people out, especially if they’re not criminals. In other ways, they aren’t otherwise felons. They are just simply people who don’t have papers. Doesn’t look good, doesn’t look good. The church wins that in terms of visuals. So the advice given by this site is that churches should consult with church law attorney before offering sanctuary. But you know, the church could, as a whole, if it decided to, commit civil disobedience. It could order sanctuary. And I do know of some places that have done that, at any rate, but I’m going to move on, because I don’t want to speak of this. There are many states and cities in America that have declared themselves sanctuary cities or states. I’m in a sanctuary city, for instance. Now this does not mean, so far, that undocumented immigrants are like concealed or sheltered from deportation. But there are things that a local government can do. Oh, by the way, Berkeley, California, was the first city to become a sanctuary city. That was 1971, for soldiers resisting the Vietnam War. Anyway we’ve moved on. Now we resist other things. So for instance, the things that you could do. Jurisdictions can have policies that restrict local police from detaining people on immigration warrants. Okay. Or for being deputized to enforce immigration law, or for allowing contracts with the federal government to hold detainees or build detention centers. So a city or state can legally opt out of helping the federal government to deport humans in those ways. That’s America. There was a situation in the Netherland–I don’t know whether you know about this, Michelle, but I think you’ll like it. The situation in the Netherlands when a church in The Hague gave sanctuary to an Armenian family that had been denied asylum by the government, and what the church did was it held non-stop church services for 96 days there is a Dutch law that police officers cannot enter a church during religious services.

Michelle Butler  20:06 

Awesome. That’s like a filibuster.

Anne Brannen  20:08 

Yes, exactly like a filibuster. Finally, the government backed down and allowed that family and others to stay. This was fairly recently. That’s my background, my context. Sanctuary. It did exist. It’s still around, and it didn’t always work, and it still doesn’t always work.

Michelle Butler  20:24 

I wanted to look at this really carefully. Anything that in general we’ve learned about, or at least I learned about, or people in general learn about, from fiction or movies about the Middle Ages, is always something I want to look at closely and find out whether it was a real thing. In particular, when I was starting the research, Googling and looking around on the web, the discussion is very across the board. Some people claim it never really was a thing. There’s not too many of those. But you have other people who claim–

Anne Brannen  21:00 

We written evidence. It’s kind of hard to claim that there wasn’t there.

Michelle Butler  21:04 

You have other people claiming that, well, it could only happen in these particular cities, at these particular times, in these particular ways, and that’s not true either. Mostly, what it was looking like to me is that people were finding information about a specific time and then assuming that was true for the full 1000 years. Because this does change over the course of the Middle Ages. How sanctuary works in the sixth century is not–just like everything else in the Middle Ages–how things work in the sixth century is not the same as how they worked in the 10th century. Is not the same as how they worked in the 12th century, and it’s not the same as how it worked in the 15th century. It changes over time. So the first thing I did was go and read the kind of big standard history. It’s Carl Shoemakers’ Sanctuary and Crime in the Middle Ages: 400 to 1500. It’s Fordham University Press, 2011. This is a really great starting place for anybody who wants to know more about this. It’s far too big and complex of a book to summarize easily. It is a Europe-wide study. It’s a lot. A lot of what he’s talking about is arguments in the history of the study of sanctuary as to whether it is a practice that shows up with the Christian church, or whether it has pagan roots as well. He says that’s a false dilemma, that one of the reasons it’s so powerful in the Middle Ages is that it has roots in both places. That in pre Christian Rome, there were elements of that society that allowed you to seek sanctuary. And then when you have the emergence of Christianity, then it changes, and you get different rationales for it, but it ends up in the same place. So the pre Christian rationale has to do with the mercy of the Emperor, that this is a place where the Emperor can show mercy. That actually shows up later in the Middle Ages, with how it ends up being related to the king. But in the early Middle Ages, sanctuary gets argued for by the church fathers as a way to offer the opportunity for a evildoer to repent. So they’re arguing that it is a spiritual act. So from those two roots, you end up with what we see in the later Middle Ages, where it’s a thing that happens in churches, but you have this compromise essentially between–it’s actually sort of interesting that you have the compromise, because so often canon law and secular law are in conflict.

Anne Brannen  23:59 

Yeah, they’re working together here.

Michelle Butler  24:01 

In this particular case, they’re working together. It is a place where it’s not so much the church is asserting its premacy over secular law. There’s so many other places where that is happening, but that it is a place where the churches–particularly in the High Middle Ages, what sanctuary does is provide a cooling off period. So somebody who is accused shows up at the church, and the 40 day period allows everybody to cool off rather than this person getting dragged out and murdered by a mob. It’s a way for the legal system to actually work.

Anne Brannen  24:46 

And the two stories that I have, for instance, the one where Edward wants to kill the knights from the other army and the one where John of Gaunt has gotten annoyed, these are both ones where there is no 40 day period. Something happens and you chased into the church. There was no cooling off period.

Michelle Butler  25:06 

The other book that I read is Elizabeth Allen’s Uncertain Refuge: Sanctuary in the Literature of Medieval England. That’s the University of Pennsylvania Press. It’s a basically new book. It’s from 2021. This book is different than the other one in that it focuses on England rather than on all of Europe, and is looking at how sanctuary appears in literature. That is a really useful approach, because the ways in which concepts show up in miracle stories, in romances, in chronicles, in poems–that tells us a lot about how the culture is thinking about the concept, rather than how it’s actually showing up. One of the things that she talks about is how over the course of the Middle Ages, what counts as the sanctuary changes, and of course, over place as well. Do you have to be in the church, or do you have to be inside the church? Do you have–

Unknown Speaker  26:09 

To hold the knocker? I love that one.

Michelle Butler  26:11 

What counts? In literature, the boundaries and the possibilities of the concept of sanctuary are being explored. For example, I’m gonna make her book sound like a collection of stories, that then she talks about. It’s not actually that. That’s just what I wish it was. What she actually has is five chapters that focus on specific things. There’s one chapter that focuses very interestingly on the anti sanctuary of the chapel in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I’m less interested in that, and I’m more interested in the places where she throws out, here’s this one, and so I focused on those. I don’t want to make the book sound different than it is. Mostly she picks specific episodes and then focuses a chapter on each of those, but in the introduction and where she’s explaining what the book is going to be about, and then in the history of sanctuary as a legal concept, both in terms of canon law and in terms of secular law that she has at the beginning, there are examples that she tosses out that I’m like, ooh, that’s interesting. I want to talk about that. But the actual first chapter of the book talks about an episode from a 12th century saint life in which a stag seeks sanctuary from the hunt in the chapel of St Cuthbert. That, of course, is an example of thinking about the boundaries of sanctuary. Can an animal seek sanctuary? Of course, in the story, the stag is allowed to hang out until the hunt has passed and is given sanctuary, because that’s the logic of story. I found that to be really interesting. I found another story that she shares in a different vita, the vita of the Bishop of Lincoln, in which Bishop Hugh of Lincoln is on a journey. So he’s on his horse, and a condemned thief is being hauled off to be executed, you know, to the gallows, and he manages to get away from his captors, throws himself basically under the hooves of Bishop Hugh’s horse, and begs for sanctuary. Now this should not work, technically, because we’re not in a church, and he’s already condemned. He’s not accused, he’s condemned. But Bishop Hugh agrees to take him into sanctuary, because he’s using the theory that, well, you know, I’m a bishop, I sort of carry the church around with me, I have this like air of holiness around me. So okay. Bishop Hugh’s attendants are just, oh my god, I don’t think this is a good idea. So that’s a really interesting one. Again, it’s an example of where the literature ,the saint’s life is thinking about, what are the limits of sanctuary? Now, I think this is a story that has metaphorical and spiritual significance, because it’s a condemned thief, like is crucified beside Jesus and shown mercy. I think there’s an echo there that’s intentional, but nevertheless, it is a story that is asking about, well, what are the limits of sanctuary? Some of our favorite authors are back. Order Vitalis, my man Orderic tells a story in his copious collection of chronicles, tells a story about knights pillaging a village and taking livestock. The villagers follow, the knights attack the villagers, and the villagers run to a roadside cross and declare that they have taken sanctuary, and the knights leader gets spooked by that and calls them off. I don’t think they give the livestock back, but they don’t murder the villagers. So that’s interesting, because that also is–

Anne Brannen  29:58 

One of those stone cross?

Michelle Butler  30:00 

Yeah, exactly. So that is also really interesting, because that is again claiming a wider definition of where you can take sanctuary than what is technically allowed, either under canon law or secular law. At this point, Matthew Paris, my man, Matthew Paris, is back telling the story of Hubert de Berg taking sanctuary three times as he’s getting away from Henry the third. Hubert de Berg was running England. You remember Henry the third came to the throne as a nine year old, and he had the elderly William Marshal as his regent as long as William Marshal could hold body and soul together. But eventually he dies, and Hubert de Berg takes over. William Marshal is like 82 when John taps him to be the child Henry’s regent. So he holds on as long as possible. But eventually Hubert de Berg takes over, and Henry puts up with this for a lot longer than what anybody else would have, because Henry is sort of a gentle soul, but eventually Hubert even annoys Henry to the point where Henry’s like, ‘you gotta go. I’m taking over.’ In the process of that, he has to take sanctuary three times during his flight trying to get away from Henry. That is also a very interesting story, because technically, Hubert shouldn’t have to do this, but he’s being careful.

Anne Brannen  30:00 

It’s one of those things where the innocents have to find something–it’s not really a crime.

Michelle Butler  30:46 

We saw this with Beckett. If you have annoyed the king, it’s possible that someone will decide to help him out in ways that are unhelpful. And actually, this book does talk a little bit about the issue with Becket and that being sanctuary, and how Henry the second has to do penance for that–some pretty serious penance for violating sanctuary. Beckett actually did not want to go, or at least the way that this book was retelling it, Becket did not want to go into the church because he was concerned that the attackers would follow him and spill blood in the sanctuary, but the monks drag him in there like ‘no, we’re going to try to save your life,’ which didn’t work, and so they end up murdering him in the church on Christmas Eve. As you do, man.

Anne Brannen  32:17 

He was concerned about the desecration of the cathedral, or concerned about the souls of the knights?

Michelle Butler  32:24 

It could be both, though the way she talks about it in here is that he’s concerned about spilling blood in the sanctuary, that if they’re going to follow him in there, it’s not going to go well. He doesn’t think that they’re going to be dissuaded by him being in the church.

Anne Brannen  32:38 

He was, of course, correct.

Michelle Butler  32:40 

Yeah, he had their number. She has a really interesting observation that is kind of lengthy, but I want to read it because I found it useful. “Sanctuary is a stage on which feudal and theocratic ideas about kingship intersect and overlap. To argue that sanctuary seeking was crucial to the structure of medieval kingship does not simply draw a picture of divine right monarchy. Instead, monarchical protection of sanctuary undercuts any simple picture of jurisdictional opposition between sacred and secular kingship. Sanctuary kingship instantiates the complexity of the relations between secular and sacred domains throughout the Middle Ages and beyond.” And this part, I thought was really, really interesting. “In post medieval texts, sanctuary was associated with merciful medieval kingship, a pious form of rule that appeared as a figment of a desirable yet impossible past. This affectively charged idea of sanctuary, which is tied to a nostalgia for a society that lived closer to the sacred, appeared long before the more familiar sentimental cries of ‘sanctuary, sanctuary’ from the heights of Notre Dame in Victor Hugo’s 1831 hunchback. Such antiquarian renditions depict sanctuary as a sacred jurisdiction in order to critique the brutal rationality of modern secular governments. At times, they imply the superior mercy of a past society in which the gracious monarch provided refuge for desperate fugitives in sacred space.” And that, I thought, was a really, really interesting observation–that sanctuary, yet again, is one of these places where the dual perception of the Middle Ages shows up. So you have the Enlightenment legal scholars wanting to say, this is an abhorrent relic of the Catholic past, this is the church interfering with secular government. But then you have it showing up in literature and in cultural imagination as an example of a place where mercy can be shown in a way that is not possible in rational, modern, secular governments. So that’s really fascinating. And I wonder, does American pardon power that shows up in our constitution where the President has the ability to pardon, is that a translation of sanctuary?

Anne Brannen  35:24 

I love that. That makes sense to me. Pardon was a part of the whole sanctuary structure. You could be pardoned and then you didn’t have to abjure the realm.

Michelle Butler  35:33 

The abjuration thing, apparently, in the High Middle Ages, according to the second book that I read is, is how it often worked out. That the 40 day cooling off period gives that time to become what’s going to happen, as opposed to a lynch mob.

Anne Brannen  35:50 

Also it gives you time to kind of, I’m assuming, that your friends and relations can come by and talk to you, because it is a church, and so you can kind of settle some affairs.

Michelle Butler  36:00 

You can get your plans in place to be able to to flee the realm. And of course, as mentioned in that paragraph, probably where a lot of us have heard about sanctuary, most commonly, is from Victor Hugo’s hunchback. But it also shows up of as a major plot point in one of Ellis Peters Cadael books.

Anne Brannen  36:24 

Yes, I was hoping that you would get to that.

Michelle Butler  36:26 

It is a major plot point in The Sanctuary Sparrow, which is, I think–it’s not the first book in the series. It’s four, five, sixth, something like that–but it was the second one adapted when they made the television series. So I went back and looked at that today. That was really interesting. So this was a really fascinating topic to look at. I am always really cautious with things that, in general, as a culture, we think we know about the Middle Ages, because about, I don’t know, 90% of the time it’s not right.

Anne Brannen  37:02 

Right, right. Details about what happened when–you know, that’s lost out of the common consciousness. But the idea of church sanctuary is not. People still believe that this counts. People show up at churches. Makes sense, really.

Michelle Butler  37:19 

This was really, really interesting. I recommend both of these books. They’re quite long, though.

Anne Brannen  37:26 

Don’t be surprised.

Michelle Butler  37:27 

Yeah, don’t be surprised. Her collection of little vignettes is at least as interesting to me as the big places. She’s got a collection of miracles attributed to St John of Beverly. And in those we get a story about William the Conqueror making his way north, and it ends up with a sanctuary question, because his soldiers invade the town of Beverly. One of them really gets enthusiastic, chases a villager inside the church, and he falls down–he’s like struck down by God. He’s struck down and has a fit.

Anne Brannen  38:07 

The soldier, not the villager?

Michelle Butler  38:09 

The soldier who is chasing. And when he falls down, struck down by God, the other soldiers throw down their weapons and run back to William the Conqueror, and William the Conqueror then chats up the local church clergy. ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ They tell him about their patron saint John Beverly. Here’s why he’s awesome. And William the Conqueror reconfirms the liberties of the church.

Anne Brannen  38:36 

Well, of course he does. And did they write it down? Did he write it down? Of course he did not. And did they have to, like, forge little charters later, like Battle Abbey?

Michelle Butler  38:46 

I’m sure they did. But the argument is that this is a story that underscores William’s right to be king

Anne Brannen  38:57 

Because he recognizes sanctuary?

Michelle Butler  38:59 

Yes, because he’s behaving the way a king should.

Anne Brannen  39:03 

Okay, all right.

Michelle Butler  39:04 

Yeah, fascinating.

Anne Brannen  39:06 

I liked this very much because I’ve been thinking about it a lot, because there’s issues of deportation, immigration, immigration law these days in the States, and I’m in a sanctuary city, so yes, I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It was nice timing for me. Well, the next time you hear from us, we’re going to be discussing for our annual April Fools, Pope Joan from the ninth century. Pope Joan, was she there? I guess you can guess what we’re probably going to say. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. We can be found on Spotify and Apple and all the places where the podcasts are hanging out. You can find us directly at truecrimemedieval.com, true crime medieval is all one word, and there you can find the links to the podcast and the show notes and the transcriptions, and there’s an index where you can look things up, because, you know, we got up to more than 100 episodes, so really, it’s harder to find things than it used to be. You can also reach us through there. That’s what we got. Pope Joan next, yeah, as we move on down into April. Bye.

Michelle Butler  40:25 

Bye.

106. Special Episode: Axlar-Björn Pétursson is Executed for Serial Murder, Snæfellsnes Peninsula, Iceland 1596

Anne Brannen  0:24 

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. My name’s Anne Brannen, and I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:34 

And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:36 

We’re having one of our special edition recordings today because we’re going a little past the Middle Ages. But that’s only because we have to go a little past the Middle Ages in order to talk about Iceland’s only serial killer in all of Iceland’s history, which we thought was worth talking about, and it was almost medieval anyway. So we would like to talk to you about Axlar Bjorn Peterson, who was executed in 1596 in Laugarbrekkuþing, Iceland. It was exciting to read about, wasn’t it, Michelle? Didn’t you enjoy this?

Michelle Butler  1:15 

Yes, yes. I kept trying to decide whether I thought that this was an ‘asterix’ Iceland’s only known serial killer. But Iceland’s a pretty small place.

Anne Brannen  1:27 

Yeah, I think if there were more serial killers, they were gonna know about it. I really do.

Michelle Butler  1:30 

Iceland is so small that the government has an app that it sponsors that you can use to see how related you are to your date. I’m telling you, we desperately need this technology in the Midwest.

Anne Brannen  1:50 

Well, in the south, I will speak for my people too. Oh, lordy. Iceland really has had a very low homicide rate, period, more or less about one year, for quite some time. Unfortunately, it spiked, and it went up to, like, four or five a year, like this last year, but not so many murders, and certainly not people that are doing what Axlar Bjorn did. Before I get to him, I wanted a little context about Iceland and, you know, the death penalty and all this business, because he did get executed. It’s actually kind of–there’s reasons for it. Iceland was settled by Norwegians in 874 and had been ruled independently, after that ruled by Commonwealth. It’s still, actually–it can argue that it has the oldest surviving parliament in Europe, and that lasted until 1262 when Norway took over. In fact, we talked about this, you remember, Michelle, because we had to discuss that when we were talking about the assassination of Snorri Sturlson?

Michelle Butler  2:58 

That’s right. That’s right, yes, because he was involved with Norway taking over Iceland. I remember.

Anne Brannen  3:05 

Yes he was, because he was a great historian, poet, but maybe not the best member of the althing, which is the parliament. So Norway took it over. And then in 1397 Norway unified with Denmark and Sweden, and so Iceland was part of that, and then later, Iceland was ruled by Denmark in 1523 when that Union dissolved. Okay. And then in 1590–so from 1523, Denmark is ruling Iceland–then in 1590, Denmark forced Lutheranism on Iceland as the official religion, and that meant also then that Iceland had to follow Danish laws. I tell you this because it’s got direct bearing on Iceland’s use of the death penalty. And now I will explain the death penalty in Iceland. See, these are the things I want to know. Okay, well, why? Why? And when? The original government, the Commonwealth, didn’t use the death penalty at all. No matter how bad you were, the government, the parliament, the althing, did not sentence you to death. They could declare that you were a person who could be rightfully killed, an outlaw, meaning that then the government didn’t kill you, but anybody else who wanted to, could–you were fair game. So that’s what would have been going on if this serial killer had lived back then. He would had to become an outlaw, which having seen many pictures of where it is he was living. I really don’t know where he would be hiding. I think he’d have to go someplace else altogether. I don’t know. I don’t know how heavily forested Iceland is in other places, but it’s not heavily forested in the place that I’m going to be talking about. So it wasn’t until the Danes made Iceland Lutheran–that was in 1551–that capital punishment, meaning the government would kill you if you were incredibly naughty, became compulsory. So Iceland had to do that, even though that hadn’t been its custom, and it was compulsory in the case of murder and infanticide, of course, but also things like theft and witchcraft and having illegitimate children. You could be put to death for that. So, great. So that was Danish law, and the Icelanders had to follow it, but they didn’t really.

Michelle Butler  5:22 

Can I ask you a question about that? Are those the same situations in which Denmark was using capital punishment, or were they imposing stiffer penalties?

Anne Brannen  5:33 

In my understanding that this is Danish law period, so my understanding is that’s, that’s Denmark also,

Michelle Butler  5:40 

Wow, that’s–having the death penalty for an illegitimate child is pretty intense.

Anne Brannen  5:46 

Yeah. The thing is, Iceland really didn’t execute as many people as other countries did. And so my guess is that one of the things that happened is that you might not necessarily always be found guilty of things, because maybe there wasn’t really enough evidence, hmmm.

Michelle Butler  6:05 

That would tend to encourage people to really want very significant–if the consequences are going to be that extreme, yeah,

Anne Brannen  6:18 

Yeah. If you’re a country that thinks of it as extreme–rather than being like England, where basically people got burned at the stake for saying things wrong occasionally. They didn’t really execute as many people as other countries were doing, and England comes to my mind. But the last capital punishment sentence in Iceland was in 1913 and that was commuted. The death penalty became abolished for lesser offenses in 1869, and the death penalty was completely abolished in 1928, and it is now unconstitutional. It cannot be brought in by making a little law.

Speaker 1  6:53 

Wow, wow. That’s fascinating.

Anne Brannen  6:56 

We don’t want to kill you. This is ridiculous. We’re the althing. Go away. Okay, our protagonist, Axlar Bjorn, he was executed in 1596, and so that’s just a few decades after the Danes instituted capital punishment. Too bad for him, because if it had been just a little before, he could have been an outlaw, and I don’t know, go to Reykjavik or something. He’d been born about 1555 or so, outside of Buthir, which in the very far west of Iceland. It’s north of Reykjavik. He was born on a farm. He began when he was a teenager to work on the farm of a man called Ormur, who was a neighbor, a rich neighbor. His son, after Ormur died, gave Axlar Bjorn a farm called Oxl. His name is Bjorn Peterson, but he’s called Axlar Bjorn on account of coming from Oxl, and that’s west of Buthir. This is all, by the way, all of it’s on the  Snæfellsnessne peninsula, which was made out of a volcano that was called–that is called, it’s still there–that’s called the Snæfellsjökullsnafus volcano, which you can see from Reykjavik, and which, according to Jules Verne, is how you get to the center of the earth. If you’re in his novel called Journey to the Center of the Earth, you go through this particular volcano. The people there who are living there now, they’re committed to sustainable tourism, and so you can with a clear conscience, go and tour, tour, tour, be a tourist all around this peninsula. They’d love for you to do that, and you will be harming the ecology in no way, because they are so taking care of things. If you go to Buthir, there’s a beach to go to where you can see the seals and birds, but you have to see them respectfully, because sustainable tourism, as I mentioned. There’s a historic church, a black church, which is like–there’s no trees, it’s just like standing up in the middle of nowhere, this beautiful black church, and it’s historic. It burnt down, but then they rebuilt it. And also, from there, you can see the glacier that’s at the top of the volcano, though, I’m sorry to tell you, it’s now disappearing, because all the sustainable tourism in the world is not going to take care of climate change. There’s a bunch of famous people who come from here, and one of them is Axlar Bjorn, the only serial killer of Iceland. There’s a historical monument that’s right above Oxl where the farm was, explaining Axlar Bjorn and his horrible, terrible history. So you can go see that. There’s a little place to park, and you can read the historical monument. It has a picture of him, which I’m sure doesn’t look anything like him, because we don’t know what he looked like. But at any rate, you can also go see the place where he was killed, the general place where he was killed. He was convicted by the Laugarbrekkuþing, which means that that’s the court at Laugarbrekka. That’s not actually a town. People go there because there’s a statue of Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir who was the wife of Thorfinn Karlsefni. They went to Vinland around 1000 and she was the first European woman to give birth in what’s now called America. But she was born there, where they have this little statue. And she went to Rome later, and she was something else. You can go and see the ruins of the farm. The farm’s not there anymore. The ruins of the farm that’s built there, that farm was built long after she lived there. But at any rate, you can go there, and it is there that he got executed. All right. The thing is. Okay. So here was my rabbit hole. It’s a great place to visit, the Snæfellsnes Peninsula. It’s marvelous. As I say, sustainable tourism, they really want you to go, and you should all go there. But as far as I’ve been able to find, the stuff about Axlar Bjorn is basically that there’s the monument, the little historical plaque over where he lived. And one other thing which I’ll explain in a bit–we don’t have contemporary records about Axlar Bjorn. The earliest records we’ve got were written down a few centuries later. But as before I mentioned Axlar Bjorn owned a farm called Oxl which means shoulder, so it was like on a hillside. And he was married. His wife was called  Þórdís Ólafsdóttir, and I’m going to mention her later again. Basically what he did is this. When people would come by the farm–it’s like in the middle of nowhere. Everything’s in the middle of nowhere. You know, there’s nothing all around there. Here’s me, here’s you, little dots, little dots. And it’s still true. I was flying over, up above the Arctic Circle at night to go visit some cousins once. This was Norway, not Iceland, but it’s more or less the same thing. And you know, it’s just little dots. Little dots alight. That’s where the humans are. Humans are all scattered around up there in the north. And so people would come by looking for work, and he would kill them. That was the deal. How he did it varies from story to story. The favorite story appears to be that he hacked him up with an ax, which is why you see renditions of him with an ax. By the way, he had apparently dug up this ax because he had a dream where a stranger told him where the ax would be and that it would make him famous. At any rate, so he had this ax. But maybe he drowned them. That’s another idea. When he was finally arrested, he confessed to nine murders. But they went and they searched the farm, and they found more stuff. So, like, 9 to 18 murders, we don’t really know. By the way, he said that the other bodies that they found–the extra bodies, these bodies were all cut up and they were like in ponds and the lava nearby–he said that he had found these bodies on the farm, and he was just getting rid of them, you know, in the ponds and in the lava. He had killed nine of them, but not the rest. Nobody believed that, and I don’t either. So there you are. The people had been sort of suspicious of him for a while, because, you know, people were disappearing. But Ormur’s son, as mentioned before, who gave him the farm–his name was Guðmundur, this guy who had given him the farm was highly influential in the area, and so Axlar Bjorn was kind of under his protection. But it just went on too long. There was the disappearing people. There was the fact there was a whole bunch of horses over at the farm, and, God knows, more stuff, more money to spend, horses and goods. There’s also a story–now this–those two things sound really clear to me, people disappeared, he had a lot of stuff. But there’s also a story that somebody nearby recognized somebody’s clothes that he was wearing. He was wearing a victim’s clothes. And I don’t know if I’m buying that, but maybe. At any rate, he was arrested. He confessed to nine murders, and because of just being under Danish law, as I explained earlier, he was condemned to death instead of being made an outlaw. What they did was, they smashed all his bones on the wheel with a sledgehammer, and then they hung him, so he was dead, dead, dead, all right, he was very dead. After that, there was a lot of concern that he might come back and do more bad things, so they cut his body all up into many pieces, and they put it under three cairns–you know, big giant piles of rocks. They put it in three cairns. Two of those cairns are gone, probably because they were building roads, I don’t know, or hotels, or, god knows what, but one of them is still there. And so you can go see it. It’s on the Hellnavegur road. And there’s parking. There’s some parking. You can pull off the road and look at the cairn, which is a just a pile of rocks, but it’s a very meaningful pile of rocks. And some of Axlar Bjorn’s bones are under there, I guess. And so, there’s two things you can go look at. When you’re doing all the wonderful looking at the volcano and doing your hiking, there’s some golfing, and you can go to the beach and look at the seals, and there’s lots of stuff, and the lovely church. And you can also go see two things concerning the serial killer, a historical plaque and a bunch of rocks. As to what happened next. I already told you what happened to Iceland and the death penalty and whatnot. Iceland basically had no death penalty. Then it had a death penalty. Now it doesn’t have anymore. But as to Axlar Bjorn’s family, his wife was pregnant at the time of the execution, and she was also convicted of not just accessory to murder, but also murder. She was given the death penalty, but loophole, loophole. She was pregnant, so she was not executed. Because you know–now this, I cannot say what happened in Denmark if you were pregnant and you got condemned to death, I don’t know. But in Iceland, if you were pregnant and you got condemned to death, they didn’t kill you. And she did have that child. I don’t know what happened to her, whether she died in childbirth or what–I don’t think they executed her, that’s not part of the story, but we don’t hear about her again. She had a son, the child that she was pregnant with was a son. He was called Sveinn Skotti. Skotti is tail. I don’t know. I was not able to find out why he is called somebody with a tail. He was later hung in 1648 for attempting to rape the daughter of the farmer at Rauðsdalur and he was hung Reiðskörð. He had also had a son. He had a son who was named Gísli hrókur–hrokur means arrogant, so that’s his nickname. He also was hung–that was in 1657 because he robbed and killed a man and his servant, and his last words, supposedly, whilst on the gallows were, ‘if I were free, I would kill you all and eat your flesh.’ The end of my story about Axlar Bjorn, the only serial killer in Iceland, and why you should go visit the peninsula where he was born and did all his killing, and even see some stuff about him. But mostly, that’s not the interesting stuff there. Yeah, you can even maybe go to the center of the earth. The end.

Michelle Butler  17:11 

I did not know that piece about–that this was the volcano that Jules Verne used. That’s really fascinating.

Speaker 1  17:18 

I know. Wasn’t that fun? There’s no way in hell I wasn’t gonna say that.

Michelle Butler  17:21 

That is really interesting. I am glad that we messed with this. This was fascinating. I had fun. So what I spent time looking at are two things, the presence of Bjorn in modern pop culture, which is interesting, but also fairly limited in what you can do with it, because it has not been translated into English. There’s a historical novel from 1988 which is, quite reasonably, in Icelandic. I’m not, you know, disputing the right of Icelandic people to have their stories in Icelandic. It just means that I can’t do too much with it.

Anne Brannen  18:04 

It would be nice to have it translated. I’d like it.

Michelle Butler  18:07 

That’d be super cool. There’s a kind of a famous rock star from Iceland who goes by the stage name of Megas. His given name is Magnus Thorjanson, but he goes by Megas, who wrote about him in a book in 1994. Also not in English, but it’s there. There’s a 2012 play that was done by an Icelandic theater group in Reykjavík that is based on the legends about Bjorn and his wife. There’s a trailer for that. That’s really, really fascinating. There is a film from 2019–

Anne Brannen  18:43 

Oh, really?

Michelle Butler  18:44 

That is modern and it’s horror. But I have no idea whether it’s actually going to ever be released, because it’s listed on IMDb as post production. If it was going to be edited and released, having been filmed in 2019 one assumes it already would have happened–

Anne Brannen  19:02 

But there was a whole like global pandemic right after that.

Michelle Butler  19:06 

Right. So that might have been a pandemic victim. However, this is a pretty popular subject for podcasts. I was actually kind of surprised to find some of that. Yeah, yeah, seven other episodes of a variety of podcasts, not just true crime, but also, you know, history and so that was really fascinating too.

Anne Brannen  19:27 

And ours is true crime and history.

Michelle Butler  19:31 

But I am going to admit to having spent the vast majority of my research time with Jon Arneson, who is a 19th century God among men. Just pick a random 19th century scholarly first, and he probably did it. He lived from 1819 to 1888 so he’s fairly long lived man. He was the first collector writing down–there were many people who collected and retold folk tales orally, but what he does is he collects and publishes the first printed collection. So it’s a huge, huge deal. He’s inspired by the Grimm Brothers. It’s part of this whole European wide movement in the 19th century towards saving–I think it’s probably a response to the Industrial Revolution, but it’s an attempt to save national culture before it just gets wiped out by the huge changes that are happening in the 19th century as a result of industrialization.

Anne Brannen  20:37 

Yeah, and it has kind of warped in some places. For instance, in Germany, in the 20th century, early 20th century, it gets kind of warped into, not only do we have this great history behind us, but also we are going to take over everything. It happens in English with Beowulf.

Michelle Butler  20:53 

The Kalevala in Finland is another example of this. I already knew about the Kalevala but Arneson’s Icelandic collection is also really fascinating because it is like Kalevala, a source for Tolkien, which I find really fascinating because this is just a generation before him. We think about him as using and drawing inspiration from these sources that are so far in the past, they’re practically forgotten. But that’s not actually what’s going on. You have these scholars a generation before him who have collected these things and brought them back into accessibility.

Speaker 1  21:34 

But that way, he’s part of a continuum.

Michelle Butler  21:37 

He is absolutely part of a contemporary movement. It’s not the case that these are the only sources Tolkien is using. That man is widely read, and a linguistic polymath.

Anne Brannen  21:47 

Yep.

Michelle Butler  21:49 

He teaches himself old Icelandic. He teaches himself old Gothic. At one point, I counted up seven languages that he had taught himself, in addition to, you know, making up about seven more. He is going back to the Sagas, but these things seem to be what catches his imagination first, and that’s really fascinating. But Jon Arneson. We all know that Tolkien is awesome, but I have to tell you why John Arneson is important. He and a buddy, but the buddy dies, get together to collect the Icelandic folk tales. But unlike some of the other scholars doing this work, they’re both broke teachers.

Anne Brannen  22:30 

So many medievalists had money, that’s how they could do it.

Michelle Butler  22:34 

They can’t afford to travel the country and interview people. What they do, though, is they write to former students, and they ask them, Hey, if you hear an interesting folktale, send it to us. So in this way, it’s very like how the Oxford English Dictionary was done. He was the first librarian of what became the National Library of Iceland.

Anne Brannen  23:02 

Oh ho.

Michelle Butler  23:03 

He was the librarian of it before it became the National Library of Iceland. In his copious spare time, he was the first curator of what became the National Museum of Iceland. He was running them both at the same time. I am in awe of this man.

Anne Brannen  23:22 

We love him. He lived in Reykjavik?

Michelle Butler  23:26 

Yes, and he was not university educated.

Anne Brannen  23:32 

No.

Michelle Butler  23:34 

He graduated from–let me go back over and double check this–he was educated at the Latin School in Reykjavik, but that’s a junior college. He is largely self-educated. In fact, I’m just going to quote now from his page on Wikipedia: “in 1877 when he was put forward as one of two Icelandic representatives to the centennial celebration of Uppsala University, the government in Copenhagen objected, because he was just a porter.”  A janitor. He had, when he was doing all these other things–it didn’t pay very well, so he supplemented his salary by working as a secretary to the bishop and as a teacher and custodian at the library school where he had himself gone to school, and the government got all up in their own ass about, well, you know, he was a janitor, so we can’t send him as a cultural representative. Just in case we wondered whether snobbery is a new thing.

Speaker 1  24:36 

No, no, no. Snobby has an ancient history amongst the humans.

Michelle Butler  24:41 

So, yes, I not getting past the fact that he is both the first librarian of what became the National Library and the first curator of the National Museum. But the government’s like, no, no, he’s not good enough to represent us. In addition to being, of course, the first editor of the collection of folk tales, he also was buds with–he was at the forefront of the nationalist movement. He was buds with a couple of people who were very, very important in the creation of the movement towards valuing Icelandic identity.  Sigurth, who was at the forefront of this–he is a poet and some other things. There was also Matthias Jacobson, who became the national poet and was writing the first national drama that, in English, is known as The Outlaws. So he was right in this whole–I mean, this is reminding me, actually, a lot of the group that Yates was involved with in Ireland. It’s a very similar movement.

Anne Brannen  25:51 

That’s really sounding much like that to me.

Michelle Butler  25:54 

I found his version of Bjorn’s story to be very, very fascinating.

Anne Brannen  26:01 

So it’s in his folklore?

Michelle Butler  26:03 

It is in his folklore. Yeah, he retells–he has collected it, and it is in there. One of the things I find really fascinating about it is the ways in which the story makes so little sense in its facts, that as it’s being retold and making its way from history into legend, the people who are telling it just really can’t grok the idea that there’s no reason for this, and so they give him reasons. But some of the things that get added in this–is the other piece that I also found really fascinating–track with what we know about the development of serial killers now.

Anne Brannen  26:41 

Oh you’re kidding me. So this was made up as part of as like folk addition to this history, and it turns out to be cognitive with what we know about, what he would have been like?

Michelle Butler  26:52 

Yes. Isn’t that fascinating that humans–I mean, before we had the Behavioral Science Unit in the FBI, which all of us know about now courtesy of John Douglas’ books and also Dr Ann Burgess, who, if you don’t know about, should really go look up, because she was freaking awesome and was instrumental in taking the boys’ project in the Behavioral Science Unit and codifying it. She was the intellectual scaffolding–instead of just going in and chatting up the serial killers, she wrote the questionnaire, said, no, ask him these questions so that we have data across that we can compare. Don’t just go in and randomly talk to them. All hail Dr Ann Burgess, who is still alive and teaching in Boston. She’s 85. Isn’t that wild? The story, as told by Arneson, starts with Bjorn’s mom craving human blood while she was pregnant with him.

Anne Brannen  27:54 

I read part of that yes, and she got the blood how, Michelle?

Michelle Butler  27:59 

Her husband, a la Little Shop of Horrors, feeds her with his own. He doesn’t go and murder people because he’s apparently the last male for three generations who hasn’t lost his goddamn mind.

Anne Brannen  28:14 

Well, he does cut up his legs so, you know.

Michelle Butler  28:17 

He’s only lost it a little bit. But that is one of those pieces that kind of tracks with what the serial killer project recognizes–that frequently serial killers have a really wacky relationship with their mothers.

Anne Brannen  28:30 

Yes, okay, got it.

Michelle Butler  28:33 

Okay. The family friend Ormur sees Bjorn abusing his brother, Magnus, and offers to take Magnus to his home, but his parents are like, it would be a really big help if you would take Bjorn instead.

Anne Brannen  28:48 

Like torturing the kittens.

Michelle Butler  28:50 

Yes, exactly. That also tracks with what we know about the development of serial killers–that violence often manifests in childhood, against siblings and against animals. So Ormur takes him home. Bjorn becomes friends with his son and and a cowherd. Because of the time period we’re dealing with, one of these symbols of Bjorn’s future darkness is that he refuses to go to church and he dreams of a stranger who offers him bits of meat from a tray. He eats 18 and says they’re great, but the 19th makes him sick. This is, again, one of these places where you have this memory of the medieval past–where you have the dream, you have truth coming in dreams. The dream stranger–I love this part–the dream stranger instructs him to go to the mountains, and this is what you were talking about, picking up the stone, and what he finds under it is his, and it’ll make him famous. And what he finds there is the ax. That is again another moment of, I think, this retelling, trying to find a answer for the unanswerable. Well, you know, some wicked force gave him this other worldly weapon. And of course, because real humans wouldn’t do this, people in their right mind, people who are left to their own devices, wouldn’t do this.

Anne Brannen  30:07 

And say, Oh, here’s an ax. I guess I have to kill people. And I ate 18 pieces of meat, so I guess that’s how many I have to throw in the lava.

Michelle Butler  30:15 

The quote from the story at this point is, ‘as soon as he had the weapon in his hand, he was filled with slaughter-longing.’

Anne Brannen  30:25 

Boy, that totally comes down from the Sagas, doesn’t it?

Michelle Butler  30:28 

That s a word that you know had–that’s not a compound word in old Icelandic. That is totally a word that just exists.

Speaker 1  30:35 

Slaughter-longing. Slaughter-longing on the whale-road.

Michelle Butler  30:38 

The next little episode is also really fascinating. He goes out with some fishermen. He asks what they’d give for what he found. So he’s got the ax, and they say, not much. He waves the ax at them like–and this another one of those lovely compounds–a fight-lusty warrior. But this next piece is really important. He realizes there’s too many of them and takes off, because that is the story. I think, making a distinction between that old saga concept of berserkers and him knowing what he’s doing. The story has this very interesting dichotomy of it’s not his fault, but it is his fault.

Anne Brannen  31:25 

Because he knows so much of what he’s doing that he waits till you come to his house by yourself.

Michelle Butler  31:31 

He is being put in a position where these decisions are easy to make, but he’s still making the decision, and he is culpable. I think it’s really fascinating.

Anne Brannen  31:44 

I love that you went down into local legend. Is it local legend or is it–does it go throughout Iceland? Do you know?

Michelle Butler  31:51 

I don’t know how he collected–unless there’s a scholarly edition that goes back and tracks his sources. This particular edition doesn’t do that.

Anne Brannen  32:00 

I just wonder whether the story of Oxlar beyond goes beyond the peninsula, or whether it’s just a local but I guess we don’t know.

Michelle Butler  32:09 

Arneson isn’t local to them, so it has to have made its way to him in Reykjavik.

Anne Brannen  32:15 

Got it. Yeah, he was the only one. There are no other serial killers. You’ve got to talk about him. Makes sense.

Michelle Butler  32:23 

Let me actually pull this back up, because there is a super freaking scary little rhyme in it that their nurse–because Bjorn is married–the nurse in their house tries to sing a little warning song to their visitors, and hide it as she’s rocking the baby.

Anne Brannen  32:46 

Oh God, tell us this.

Michelle Butler  32:49 

She’s rocking the baby. She’s wanting to warn the people. “And whenever Bjorn’s wife went out of the room and none but the guests were present, she chanted, mutteringly, this diddy: ‘none at murder-Bjorn’s should be guest, who is in goodly garments dressed, he bears them off to the leeches tarn,” –that’s the lava field “– there runs blood along the road. I lull thee, lull thee, bairn.” Love the little end, I’m just rocking the baby, pay no attention.

Anne Brannen  33:24 

Unfortunately, none of them listen. Of course, there wasn’t actually a child there, because the first child that was born was that the one that will go on to be a murderer, and he never met daddy. But it’s a good story.

Michelle Butler  33:36 

Arneson’s version is a really, really fascinating amalgam of fairy tale elements. So for example, one guest shows up and is put in the guest room and is poking around and realizes, Oh, my God, there’s a body under the bed. This isn’t good. So he puts the body up on the bed, and he goes under the bed. And this was a really good idea, because Bjorn and his wife come in in the middle of the middle of the night and try to kill him, and all they do is kill the body.

Anne Brannen  34:04 

I have heard that story from tales on the continent. That’s a very that’s a very common story.

Michelle Butler  34:10 

Tropes get pulled in from other stories, but then you also have these pieces that are pretty clearly connected to his story and are also a really realistic understanding of the world. So a little bit later, a brother and sister are traveling. This is the only place they have to stay. The brother hears the sister scream during the night, he takes off. He gets to a neighboring farm of Ingemunder. Ingemunder does not get on with Gudmunder, who is Bjorn’s foster, brother Ormur’s son, and that’s why Ingemunder is willing to do something. It’s not because this is just the right thing to do. It’s that, well, I didn’t like that guy anyway, so I will totally do something.

Anne Brannen  34:55 

This sounds like a really good telling of this dreadful story.

Michelle Butler  34:58 

It is, and it’s not very long. It’s only about eight pages long. It’s very concise.

Anne Brannen  35:04 

Well, what’s interesting about the real story itself is that it’s really tiny. It’s a very small thing. He killed a bunch of people, and then he got killed–he was executed. And really, there’s some details to that, but there’s not many.

Michelle Butler  35:16 

I do really like the detail of the neighbors starting to wonder, now, where is he getting all these horses? Because that, too, is totally a normal piece of living in a small town, you know, living in a small community.

Anne Brannen  35:29 

In reality, the way a lot of criminals get caught. People wondering. Furs for his wife. How they catch spies too. Money from Russia. That’s what happens.

Michelle Butler  35:39 

In Arneson’s retelling is kind of interesting also in how Bjorn dies. There’s a point made of mentioning that he met his death manfully.

Anne Brannen  35:50 

Oh, really.

Michelle Butler  35:51 

I’ll just read it to you. “A young man, a near kinsman of Bjorn’s, was got to break his limbs and behead him.” So they force a relative to do it. Good job, I guess. “His legs were broken with a wooden club and something soft put under them that his torments might be all the more painful. Manfully, Bjorn met his death and all the tortures that accompanied it. Neither changed he his mien nor gave one sign of pain. Once while his bones were being broken, he said, seldom breaks a bone well on hollow ground, kinsman Olfar. When all his limbs were broken, his wife said to those around fast, now are mangled the limbs of my Bjorn. But Bjorn, hearing this, said, one more there is left yet. However, which on me better were off. This said, he was beheaded.” I don’t even know what to make of this. He’s quite terrible, but he gets to have this brave death.

Anne Brannen  36:52 

That’s a hero’s ending.

Michelle Butler  36:54 

Yes. Oh man.

Anne Brannen  36:58 

That is really weird.

Michelle Butler  36:59 

Yeah, you know, being able to face your death without crying out in pain is a virtue, is something admired in Scandinavian culture.

Anne Brannen  37:09 

It’s almost as if no one really knows what to do with this story. This is so non-Icelandic. This guy kills like 9 to 18 people like no–for just because he’s greedy. Totally non Viking. Because Viking, they do go and get a bunch of stuff, but it’s always honorable, because, you know, they’re fighting. This is not fighting. This is just killing some travelers and sticking them in the lava. Yeah, he makes no sense.

Michelle Butler  37:32 

This seems like the sort of story, though, that would get retold, because each generation can retell it to be what they need it to be. It’s a very adaptable story.

Anne Brannen  37:43 

Yeah, because there’s so little of it and nobody understands it. Serial killers are hard to understand anyway. This is, like, really hard. This is not somebody hanging around and, oh, I don’t know, let’s say England or Scotland, where there are several mini families that killed travelers that came by and stole the horses. You know, that was just a way of life.

Michelle Butler  38:02 

And we don’t actually have that many serial killers that are in our time period. We have lots and lots of violence, but not this particular kind of violence that seems to be largely unmotivated.

Anne Brannen  38:20 

We did Elizabeth Bathory, and she was also past the Middle Ages.

Michelle Butler  38:24 

Gilles de Rais.

Anne Brannen  38:24 

Gilles de Rais. In the middle of the Middle Ages. That was Gilles de Rais, serial killer of the Middle Ages, par excellence. Gilles de Rais, sure. Because there’s no talking here, like about being in league with the devil. I mean, the story about the stranger and the sword and the ax–that gets added later. There’s nothing about ‘he was trying to do blood rites in order to make the lava turn into copper.’ No, there’s nothing happening. There’s nothing. It’s just, he just wanted some stuff. Apparently.

Michelle Butler  38:54 

There’s some hints that he’s just kind of bad seed from the get go, and certainly what happens with his son and his grandson would tend to make people think that, although there’s real good questions about whether that’s going to be a nature or nurture thing. Because what is your life going to be like if you’re being raised and every single person knows that this was your dad? That’s a that’s a hard row to hoe.

Anne Brannen  39:22 

This was fun. I’m very fond of Iceland. I’m getting more and more fond of Iceland. Anything else?

Michelle Butler  39:28 

No, that’s what I have. I am glad that we looked at this, because it’s both really, really–you know, tracks with many tropes of folk tales, but it also is really bizarre and interesting.

Anne Brannen  39:44 

So interesting having to do with Iceland. The next time that you hear from us, we are going to talk about sanctuary. Was it real? Did it happen? Did it work? Because we want to know, so we’re going to go think about it. I know one time at least, it did work, but I know another one it didn’t. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. We can be found on Spotify and Apple podcast and all the places where the podcasts are hanging out. And if you go to truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word–that’s our website–you can find links to the podcast and to the show notes and to the transcripts, and there’s an index in case you should want to look up oh for instance Snorri Sturlson and find out more about Iceland. We’d love to hear from you in the comments, and I think that’s good for us. Bye.

Michelle Butler  40:38 

Bye.

105. St. Adalbert of Prague is Martyred, Truso, Poland 997

Anne Brannen  0:23 

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen and I’m in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:31 

And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:34 

We’re glad to be back in the saddle. We’ve had a very, very interesting few months where we were very busy, both of us and in other realms, like, you know, thinking about things or healing ourselves from various annoying things. But we’re back. And so today, we want to talk about that time, 997 was the year, in Prussia when St Adelbert of Prague was murdered by a group of pagans who found him really quite annoying and so didn’t manage to be converted. So that’s where we are. He was murdered in 997 but he became canonized really quickly after. Michelle, was it like two years after?

Michelle Butler  1:17 

Yeah, it’s fast track. It’s 999.

Anne Brannen  1:20 

He’s the patron saint of the Czech Republic and Prussia, and an archdiocese in Hungary as well. He had been born in the early 950s in the Bohemian region of the Czech Republic to a powerful family. His father was a duke, and his mother came from a royal dynasty, and he was one of about six sons. His parents dedicated him to God after he survived some terrible illness in his childhood, which I don’t know what it was, but I sure wish I did. He was sent to be educated in Magdeburg with Adalbert of Magdeburg, and Adalbert of Magdeburg was the first Archbishop there, because the city itself, at that time was only about 160 years old, having been founded by Charlemagne, and the archbishopric had been created at the Synod of Ravenna. Magdeburg is on the Elbe River. Across the river were Slavic lands, and so the archbishops of Magdeburg spent–they were really, really intently part of this migration of Germanic peoples into the Slavic and Baltic areas, which involved not just, you know, going and colonizing things and taking people, but also bringing Christianity and missionary work. By the way, Michelle, later on,  Magdeburg becomes part of the Hanseatic League. I thought you might like–

Michelle Butler  2:48 

Oh, interesting.

Anne Brannen  2:50 

Yes, we’re fans of the Hanseatic League. So our Adalbert–actually his name was Vojtech, very common name, but he changed it to Adalbert, in honor of his tutor at Magdeburg as his confirmation name. That was in 981, and then he went back to Bohemia. His tutor, Adalbert, had died by then, and he became a priest in Bohemia. A year later, when he was still too young, he was made Bishop of Prague, mostly because he wasn’t expected by the secular powers to cause trouble by trying to get power for the church. This turned out to actually be a mistake, kind of like–oh, who is that worst person we love? Oh, Thomas A Becket is kind of like that. But he was generous. He was very, very charitable, and he lived a very simple life. There was like, fancy food around and he didn’t eat it. And he proceeded to attempt to convert the Bohemians, but that didn’t work real well. He also tried to change some fundamental aspects of the Bohemian culture, and that wasn’t very good. These fundamental aspects being things like keeping slaves and worshiping idols, you know. And so that didn’t go well. He wasn’t really doing well with making the Bohemians behave. So he managed, therefore, to piss off both the religious and the secular powers. Then his family totally refused to support the Ddke in some war he was having against Poland, and so Adalbert had to go on the run. That’s why he went to Rome in 988, and he became a hermit for a while. The Duke of Bohemia eventually wanted him to come back, and so he did, with the proviso that if he wanted to, he could leave Prague, like, if things didn’t get better for him as a Christian bishop, he could give it up. At any rate, things looked pretty good for a while. The people were very happy to have him back, but in 995 a town that was held by his family was attacked by a rival family. Several of Adalbert’s brothers were killed, and the family lost an estate, and after that, there was this noble woman who was caught in adultery. She ran to a convent for sanctuary, but the people who were after her found her and murdered her anyway, which was a violation of sanctuary. So we have to have that on our list for when we’re talking about sanctuary. Was it really a thing? Which is coming up soon. At any rate, Adalbert was quite annoyed by this, so he excommunicated everybody, and that was too much. So he had to leave Prague. Then he refused to go back when the Pope wanted him to. He asked instead, could he be allowed to be a missionary? Because, you know, things had not been going so well for him as a religious leader in Bohemia. So he therefore went to attempt to convert the Baltics. Let’s all have a little moment where we’re really sad for him in this endeavor, because it’s going to take an army for Europe to convert the Baltics. And in some places, that’s not going to work, even for a long time. But at any rate, he went to Hungary, and then he went to Poland, and he was made a bishop in Poland. And then he left that too, and he went to Prussia. All right, he had three, at least three companions, although not a whole lot of people were with him. There was an interpreter, and they traveled along the Baltic coast. Adalbert was preaching along the way. They would stop and they would get out, and Adalbert would be preaching. But it didn’t really go so very well, because Adalbert was kind of arrogant and domineering, and that didn’t go over with the pagan Baltics very well. Also, he had a book, and books were really bad for the old Prussians, because as far as they were concerned, books are inherently untrustworthy, because the only kind of real communication happens when people are in the same place at the same time. You know, you have to talk face to face to be actually having communication. Otherwise who knows what’s in books? I mean, who knows? They would be so unhappy with the communications that we’ve got now. ‘Hello, Michelle.’ They’d be appalled by this. So first place he preached, he got hit in the back of the head with an oar, and his book lost a bunch of pages, and they had to run for it. The second group he attempted to convert made a whole bunch of scary noise, saying that he needed to die. And so they had to get out of there too. Finally, April 23 997, he went to Truso. I have a lot to say about Truso, and I’m not even going to apologize, because I liked it too much. Truso was a Viking port that the Vikings had built where some trade roads crossed, but by the time Adalbert got there, the trade, which was mostly was amber and fur and slaves–the trade had declined. Now the town is completely gone. We know from the archeology that it had been destroyed by pirates or something about 100 years after Adalbert is there, so it didn’t actually last that much longer. Elblag took its place as a trade center for the area. But we know exactly where it was from archeology, which you can learn about at the Elblag Museum of Archeology and History. That’s the nearest actual place that exists, because Truso doesn’t exist anymore. But you can learn about that in Elblag, and you could get to Truso, you could get there in a 10 minute bus ride, six minutes by taxi. It’s a walk for an hour. It’s less than three miles from the center of Elblag. But you have to be very careful, when you’re looking for this and where to go, because there are many, many, many hiking trails, things to do in the Valley of Truso in Georgia, and that’s over on the other side of everything, you know, down by Russia. It’s not really the Baltics at all. It’s a wonderful place, I’m sure. I saw the pictures. It’s great, but it’s not where you want to go. So you have to be very careful when you’re Googling Truso, because if you’re Googling tourism in Truso, you end up in Georgia, because there’s not really any tourism in Truso. But if you actually get to Truso in Poland, what’s there is archeological excavations, and the Truso Association is trying to build an open air museum where you can really experience the Truso experience. I don’t know if they’re going to have any kind of like–if you get to like, kill St Adalberts or anything, but you can experience Truso. They’re they’re working on that. They’re working on it. It’s not there yet. In 2023 the Truso Association had a fest at the Elblag Archeology Museum at which guests could hear lectures by archeologists, and they could practice early medieval crafts. I’m very sorry to tell you this, Michelle, because you’re just going to die–you could take a cruise on the Elblag River on the Freya 2, which is a Viking boat reconstruction, so that you could travel–

Michelle Butler  10:04 

Ahhh.

Anne Brannen  10:06 

I knew it. Travel in a boat made with Scandinavian craftsmanship.

Michelle Butler  10:10 

Oh man.

Anne Brannen  10:13 

Not even done yet. On the same waterway that Wulfstan sailed on, and he was the only author of that time to write about Truso. Okay, now another thing, this is not St Wulfstan, who was not, you know, from here at all. So don’t get confused. Don’t get confused. This is Wulfstan of Hedeby, who was either English or German. We don’t know. It’s unclear. He was a traitor, and he traveled by sea from Hedeby, which was in Germany at that time and is now Denmark. I tell you, this is the most confusing place in the world–these lines. He traveled from there to Truso in Prussia in 880. It took seven days and nights to do that. And he names all the places that they go by. He includes a description of the traditions and customs of the old Prussians, the Western Balts–the Romans called them the Ostsee. But anyway, these are the same people that kill St Adalbert, which is why it’s of interest to us. This account is found in one place. It’s in the Old English Orosius, which is an old English adaption and translation from the Latin of Historiae adversus paganos by Paulus Orosius. The adaptation includes not just Orosius’ history of the calamities that befell all the pagans, humans before Christ, but Wulfstan’s travelogue and a Norwegian travelogue as well, written by an author called Ohthere. So that’s the literary source for this Viking cruise near Truso which Michelle could have gone on if she had known about it, but she didn’t. I’m very sorry that we did not cover St Adalbert of Prague earlier.

Michelle Butler  12:00 

That sounds awesome. I mean, they are grabbing their tourism opportunities with both hands. I say, go for it, dude.

Anne Brannen  12:14 

Yeah, they go on our little interactive map we’re going to make some day of tourism of crime in the Middle Ages. Yeah, for sure, for sure.

Michelle Butler  12:20 

Those of us that watch PBS, it’s often sponsored by Viking Cruises, and they have in their advertising, ‘you can go up river in a Viking longship,’ and it’s a constant source of disappointment, because it’s not. It’s just a boat.

Anne Brannen  12:39 

This is not just a boat. It’s Scandinavian craftsmanship, a true Viking ship on the place where Wulfstan went. Now there’s more. I’m not even done with the list. So hang on. There was also at the fest, a bicycle tour from Elblag to Truso, accompanied by an archeologist who along the way, and when you got there, explained history and discovery and research of the site, and–

Michelle Butler  13:05 

Oh, whoa.

Anne Brannen  13:09 

The participants could also see the very same bicycle which was ridden by the guy who found the settlement.

Michelle Butler  13:17 

Actually, that’s also pretty cool. I mean, everything about this is cool.

Anne Brannen  13:23 

I know .I would love this too.

Michelle Butler  13:25 

This would have been great.

Anne Brannen  13:26 

The whole damn thing was free of charge. Lasted all day, Saturday, June 17, 2023. But okay, really, as far as I tell, there’s nothing to actually see or do at Truso, unless you’re actually an archeologist or you’re on a special bicycle tour there.

Michelle Butler  13:42 

How dare they do interesting things without telling me.

Anne Brannen  13:47 

How dare they indeed. Where was I? Okay. So Adalbert got to Trusor, you know, because there was actually some stuff there, not just, you know, archeology. And nobody liked him there either. So they had to leave. At some point they got to Primorsk, which is in Kaliningrad, which is now Russia. Because he got killed at Truso. But no, no, no, he got killed at Primorsk. I don’t know which is true. I believe nobody knows which is true. But over at Truso, they think it’s there. At Primorsk, they think it’s there. That’s in Kaliningrad. It’s not called Kaliningrad anymore. The Russians own it. It’s like that place that’s on the Baltic, which there’s stuff in between it and actually Russia, only Russia owns it so they have a sea port on the Baltic. It must be from there that they sent that fleet to Japan that kept trying to shoot down Japanese torpedo boats only it was fishing boats.

Michelle Butler  14:46 

Oh, my lord, I was at the eye doctor yesterday, and I watched that video that you sent while I was in the waiting room. If that was in a movie, people would think that you were taking poetic liberties.

Anne Brannen  15:04 

Those were all things that happened. Anyway, yes, the Russian port on the Baltic. They got there. Either when he got to Kaliningrad or when he got to Truso, at some point, a bad thing happened. Here’s our crime for the day. It happened someplace over in that general region, and you can just decide where you want to go visit, is what I say. It was 997, and what he did first was he destroyed the sacred oak grove, which was really stupid. Charlemagne got into some trouble with that with the Saxons. He destroyed the sacred oak grove and this annoyed the Saxons no end. So a whole bunch of them fell on Adalbert and his companions whilst they were lying in the grass eating a snack. It was after mass, and they were eating. Now, if you are me, what you said is, ‘what’s the snack,’ and find the snack.

Michelle Butler  16:03 

What is the snack?

Anne Brannen  16:06 

Our sources do not tell us what the snack was. However, I did some research. I believe, because I’m thinking, what do people eat for a snack when you’re on the road? Cheese and bread. Cheese and bread. The thing is, at this point, hard cheese wasn’t being made here. So it’s soft cheese, and you can’t take soft cheese on the road with you. I mean, either for long or, you know, you just can’t do it. But what you can do is you can mix it with an egg and a little flour, and you can make these kind of fat pancake things. You can cause the cheese to be stable. Then you can go. So that’s what I thinking. I’m thinking they’re eating these little, essentially, cottage cheese pancakes. No, okay, no–ricotta pancakes. Let’s go with ricotta instead of cottage cheese. I found a recipe for it too, from Russia.

Michelle Butler  16:53 

Oh, are you gonna send that to me so we can put it in the show notes? Because I think we should.

Anne Brannen  16:58 

Why don’t I? And then all of us can pretend we’re Adalbert and his beleaguered companions and go around throwing our books and eating cottage cheese pancakes. That would be good.

Michelle Butler  17:09 

When my husband and I went to Honduras, we had a dish very like that. It was called pan con queso, and it was cheese inside of bread.

Anne Brannen  17:21 

Yeah, even soft cheese can be made something that you can take with you. I myself would rather have cheddar in a hard roll, but then, you know, I come from a much later time, as it happens. I’ll send you the recipe. So the annoyed pagans fell on Adalbert whilst they were eating their nice snack, and it didn’t go well for him, except for  the becoming a saint really quickly part. The leader of the pagans, the pagan priest, who was in the front of this mob, hit him first, and Adalbert thanked God for giving him the opportunity to suffer for him, at which the pagan priest said, ‘be joyous then, since you want nothing more than to suffer with your Christ.’ And so then they beat him to death. They beat him and they hit him and they made cuts, and he’s finally dead. So they cut his head off and they put his head on a pole, and they took it back home with them, and his body, they threw in the water. All right. Adalbert’s dead. We’ve caught up. The King of Poland bought his body with his weight in gold so as to bring it back home. The King of Poland. You note this is the King of Poland. Not the Bohemian Duke, since the rival family of Adalbert’s family was still in power over in Bohemia. But Boleslaus the first, the King who ransomed the body, was able to kind of leverage that into power. He had cred. So after that, in 1039, the Bohemians say that their Duke looted the bones and that they’re in Prague, but the Poles say that the Bohemians stole the wrong bones and so the real ones are still over in Poland. The separate heads showed up later, but there’s actually a head in both these places. So one of them is real and one of them is not. Both the Prague Cathedral and the Royal cathedral of Gniezno have major shrines to St Adalbert, and they both say that they have the relics, but we, who are not one of them, know not which set of relics is the right one. Adalbert ends up with 10 Roman Catholic feast days, one of which, the 23rd of April, is his death day, which is the one that makes sense to me. Some have to do with the consecration of churches, but six of his saints days commemorate one day or another when his bones are getting moved around.

Michelle Butler  19:56 

Oh my Lord.

Anne Brannen  19:57 

So what happened next? The old Prussians that Adalbert was attempting to convert were Baltic. They spoke a Baltic branch–Old Prussian is now extinct, but they spoke a Baltic branch of the Balto-Slavic branch of Indo-European. And they resisted Christianity until the 13th century, when the Teutonic Order subjugated the area in the northern crusades–that is the Baltic crusades–whereby through forced baptism and military occupation, the indigenous population of the Baltics became Christian, except for the Lithuanians that we have mentioned before, because they were able to resist and it was not until the end of the 14th century that the Lithuanians, the last of the European pagans, were baptized. The Baltic people became Christian by force, and it took armies to do it, and so Adalbert really didn’t stand a chance. But he was clearly a man who relished difficult circumstances, and he clearly had a lot of, I don’t know, psychic wherewithal and courage, but he should not have cut down the sacred grove. And really, things went much worse for him in Prussia than they had in Bohemia, and so there was no point in leaving Bohemia, really. And that is my part of the story. I knew that tour would get you. I knew it.

Michelle Butler  21:23 

Oh man.

Anne Brannen  21:24 

When I find stuff like that, I’m like, woo hoo, because I know I’ve got something you didn’t find that you were just gonna–

Michelle Butler  21:30 

I did not find that. And that was pretty wild. Oh my goodness.

Anne Brannen  21:35 

I like to know just that it existed. But that was 2023. So it’s after COVID. It’s after the ‘let’s shut the entire world down’ part. I don’t know what they’re doing now, though, I couldn’t find anything else. I had to translate all the Polish into English. But I don’t think they were talking about it elsewhere. But maybe, maybe, maybe.

Michelle Butler  21:57 

I found some touristy things, but I did not find that.

Anne Brannen  22:02 

Well, what did you get? What you got?

Michelle Butler  22:04 

I found that a for hundreds of years, that John John Canaparius was held to be the earliest, the likely earliest biographer. Because this stuff happens really fast. You know, he’s martyred in 997, he’s canonized in 999, and then the books start coming really quickly. But a recently discovered manuscript in Aachen seems to be older than John Canaparius’ book, and I mean recent as in the book that is the edited version and explaining the discovery is from 2005.

Anne Brannen  22:45 

Wow. Okay. So when was John Canaparius?

Michelle Butler  22:49 

This is really quick, too. It had long been assumed, and I’m quoting, “it had long been assumed that in the year 999, he wrote,” actually, that’s a reasonable assumption. If you got a book that’s being written two years, hot off the presses, “he had written the first Vita of Saint Adalbert, called the Life of St Adalbert of Prague.” He was a member of the same monastery that Adalbert of Prague had come from. So these things are all very reasonable to have put together that he is the first biographer, but this recently discovered manuscript in Aachen appears to be even earlier and a source then for this.

Anne Brannen  23:35 

Oh, cool.

Michelle Butler  23:39 

That is so exciting. This is so wild, and it pushes back against the general belief we have about this as being a time in which communication is very slow. This stuff is happening. It’s zipping across the continent, and everybody’s hearing about this. It’s happening very, very quickly.

Anne Brannen  24:06 

Yeah, communication is as fast as your horse or your boat.

Michelle Butler  24:10 

The fact that this is in Aachen is not as crazy as it sounds, because he was venerated very, very quickly in Aachen. That the center, of course, of the Carolingian sphere of influence. The Empire was falling apart by this point, Charlemagne’s Empire was falling apart because of dividing the kingdom with each generation, but it was still a really big center of culture. And one of the very first churches dedicated to Saint Adalbert is in Aachen. It was actually dedicated in the year 1006, so he had not even been dead 10 years–

Anne Brannen  24:50 

Wow.

Michelle Butler  24:51 

When they built a church to him in Aachen. So this manuscript being there is not insane, but I will say that the scholars who concluded that John Canaparius was the first biographer–that seems to me to be an entirely reasonable assumption to have made. But I do very much enjoy it when we find scholarship that demonstrates how this is a living field and that we’re constantly finding new things.

Anne Brannen  25:16 

Well, that is lovely.

Michelle Butler  25:17 

The two tombs are pretty interesting. There’s also streets named for him in Aachen. I forgot to mention that. The church is on a street that is also named for him. The cathedral in Poland, where his bones went first and possibly stayed, depending on whether you believe that the raid stole the right ones or the wrong one or bits–who knows–that church has a set of doors that illustrate the saint’s life, and they are a big deal. They are actually older than the church they currently inhabit. They were made around 1175 and when the church was rebuilt, they were moved into it.

Anne Brannen  25:59 

I try and find images of all these things. There are some, of course, really nicely gory later renditions of Adalbert getting murdered. But I have seen also that door.

Michelle Butler  26:10 

There’s 18 scenes from his life on the two doors. It is–I’m just going to quote this because it’s such a such a nice statement:  “to illustrate the life of a single saint on such a monumental scale was most unusual in this period. And these doors are the only Romanesque ones in Europe that illustrate the life of a saint.” Of course, many of us might be more familiar with the set of doors in Florence that do something similar. But those are Renaissance.

Anne Brannen  26:40 

Yeah, those are way much later.

Michelle Butler  26:43 

Lots, lots later. I was kind of astonished, actually, at the number of churches that are named for St Adalbert throughout history. He was a big deal in the Middle Ages, and he continues to be a big deal. If you search for churches named for St Adalbert, you will come up with the one in Aachen, but you will also come up with, there’s one in Chicago. There is one in St Paul, Minnesota that has masses in both English and Vietnamese, which I mention because this shows how he’s still a living presence.

Anne Brannen  27:16 

Yeah, I thought you were about to say masses in both English and Polish, but no.

Michelle Butler  27:19 

No. Vietnamese. So he’s still a living presence in the church. It’s not like every church named for him is a is now a historic monument. A lot of these churches are still being used as churches. I think that the VIZE 97 prize, which is this prize that was begun in 1999 that’s awarded by the Dagmar and Vaclav Havel foundation, is another indication of the continued salience, the continued cultural salience, of St Adalbert. “This prize is awarded annually to people who, through their work, cross the traditional framework of scientific knowledge, contribute to the understanding of science as an integral part of general culture and in an unconventional way, deal with the fundamental questions of knowledge, being and human existence.”

Anne Brannen  28:09 

What has that got to do with Adalbert?

Michelle Butler  28:12 

I don’t have a clue, but the prize is a replica of his crozier.

Anne Brannen  28:17 

Wow.

Michelle Butler  28:18 

I think maybe it’s because he’s the patron saint of the Czech Republic, and isn’t Vaclav Havel from the Czech Republic?

Anne Brannen  28:29 

Yeah, yeah.

Michelle Butler  28:30 

So I think that’s the connection. But again, what it says to me is Saint Adalbert has become a cultural marker–

Anne Brannen  28:40 

Right, right.

Michelle Butler  28:41 

–that is useful to connect up to. There is a very recent, like from last April, 2024 inspirational biography that was just published. I can’t tell you anything more than that, because I didn’t read it, but I know it exists. Because I’m not a nice person, my favorite part of my research was Bruno of Querfurt.

Anne Brannen  29:04 

Ah, yes.

Michelle Butler  29:06 

Oh, lordy, Bruno Bruno. Bruno. So Saint Adalbert goes off, gets murdered, but at least he has all of this posthumous fame. People appreciate him. He’s been canonized. Many a church, the Havel Foundation has connected their prize to him. Okay, Bruno meets and is inspired by Adalbert during his lifetime. He meets him in Rome when he’s there for Otto’s Imperial coronation. He also, Bruno is also part of a noble family from Saxony. He may actually have been distantly related to the Holy Roman Emperor Otto the third because he was in Rome for that guy’s coronation, and Otto made Bruno part of his royal court– when they were both still young, actually, because Otto was only 15 and Bruno was young through his entire life, because he barely makes it to 30 before he gets martyred. He spends time at the same monastery that Adalbert had become a monk, and when Adalbert is martyred, Bruno’s like, ‘I’ve got my marching orders.’ Pope Sylvester the second appoints him to head up a mission to go try to convert those pagan peoples. He can’t get to Poland first, so he goes to Hungary. And then he makes it his mission to try to go to all the places that Adalbert of Prague had–you can guess where this is going. He’s called the second apostle to the Prussians–

Anne Brannen  30:42 

The third is the Teutonic Knights.

Michelle Butler  30:46 

So he gets beheaded in February of 1009. I shouldn’t find this hilarious, but I do–that Adalbert gets all this mention, accolades, churches. Bruno, he and his companions are venerated as martyrs. He’s canonized. And then he just drops off the face of the earth.

Anne Brannen  31:10 

Yeah, I’d never heard of him.

Michelle Butler  31:11 

I did Google. There are churches named for him, but they’re all in Poland. He did not make it out. There’s no church, as far as I can tell, named for him in St Paul, Minnesota or Chicago. He doesn’t make it into the global Catholic Church, so poor Bruno. Man.

Anne Brannen  31:27 

So let’s have a little moment where we’re sorry for this guy. He had a wonderful inspiration and went and–

Michelle Butler  31:34 

He did the thing and then–this is called the first mover advantage. If you’re the first person to do it, people notice, and if your second one, they go, meh. The book that I read, though, about the conversion of Poland sort of gives it away right in the title: The Conversion of Poland from Barbaric Pagans to late Medieval Christians, which tells you it didn’t happen in the 11th century. It happened so much later.

Anne Brannen  32:03 

That’s so interesting, because some places Christianize so quickly, like Ukraine, for instance, Christianized really quickly.

Michelle Butler  32:10 

These guys were not having it.

Anne Brannen  32:13 

The Baltics, no, no. Lithuania, they held up. I can tell you why it is that Adalbert is important to us in our spiritual lives, if you would like to know.

Michelle Butler  32:24 

Okay.

Anne Brannen  32:25 

It’s living simply, serving generously and being courageous.

Michelle Butler  32:29 

Well, he certainly had that impact on the people around him. Everybody who interacted with him, except for, you know, the pagans, was really impressed with him. It’s actually a big deal to inspire somebody else to come along and do the same thing.

Anne Brannen  32:42 

Especially when it’s had such a bad ending. It’s not like finding gold in California.

Michelle Butler  32:48 

Exactly.

Anne Brannen  32:50 

I’ll go along with that. That’s a great deal of courage and real commitment to the cause. Absolutely. He was just so–he was gonna convert him, by God. They didn’t convert at that time, but they did later, the Teutonic Knights being at the front of that.

Michelle Butler  33:03 

This is interesting background to the Crusades that end up happening in this area of the world. I’m sure we’ll end up dealing with that at some point too, because I’m positive there were one or two atrocities that happened in the course of that.

Anne Brannen  33:17 

There has to have been. Well, I consider the cutting down the sacred groves pretty atrocious. But yeah, like actual murders and things, there’s going to be some stuff going on. We’ll find that. Because there’s more material really, on the Crusades that are going on in the Holy Land. But yeah, the desire to make all the rest of Europe behave, that was very strong amongst the Christian Europeans. So you found some tourism.

Michelle Butler  33:43 

Sorry, no, I did actually just mention that already. It’s in Aachen. It’s in Aachen, and it’s the cathedral doors in Gniezo where one of his shrines are. If one gets to go there, not only check out his shrine, but also the doors, because they’re important, they’re really important from a cultural and artistic standpoint. The engineering of them is quite interesting. One door is cast as a whole piece, and the other one is made out of several small pieces. And I’m not finding anything that explains why that choice was made. That is pretty interesting.

Anne Brannen  34:21 

I would like to see–all these things I want to see.

Michelle Butler  34:24 

The church in Aachen, sadly, was very heavily damaged in the Second World War. It was hit really bad. It pretty much ended up with just exterior walls standing so they rebuilt it, but that’s a pretty rough motor scooter to have it taken so far down–particularly, you know, at that point that church would have been more than 1000 years old. Well, close, to 1000 years old–so that’s kind of annoying. I’m sure there are many, many books about the number of medieval things we lost during the Second World War. A lot of things that had managed to survive hundreds of years did not make it through those six years.

Anne Brannen  35:08 

St Julian’s, where Julian of Norwich was, got destroyed. There’s just a tiny little bit of it left, and they rebuilt the church, and they added on a kind of room. It’s much bigger than Julian’s would have been.

Michelle Butler  35:19 

I actually didn’t know that Julian’s cell had survived until then, that’s interesting.

Anne Brannen  35:22 

It didn’t. No, this church is gone. There’s a tiny bit of it, like an arch, if I remember this, tiny bits survive. They rebuilt the church, and they made a room that would have been much bigger than her room, where you can go and meditate on her and pray and whatnot, yeah. But no, it was destroyed.

Michelle Butler  35:38 

I do not have anything else that. That is what I found. I found a whole lot of things connected to Adalbert and poor old Bruno with less.

Anne Brannen  35:46 

So sorry about poor Bruno.

Michelle Butler  35:48 

We do not talk about Bruno.

Anne Brannen  35:50 

What I want to know is what happened to Adalbert’s companions, although probably they’re the ones that got the body out of the water and went back home.

Michelle Butler  35:58 

I don’t know. Bruno’s companions were all murdered with him. It might depend on the situation you found yourself in.

Anne Brannen  36:04 

Right, or how you were acting, maybe.

Michelle Butler  36:06 

It is true that Bruno and his companions made efforts to be less annoying. They grew their beards out and they tried to dress like the people they were gonna go talk to.

Anne Brannen  36:15 

They didn’t throw books around and stuff.

Michelle Butler  36:17 

It did help. He lived longer.

Anne Brannen  36:19 

That’s true. 10 years is not bad for trying to convert the Baltics. Oh, lordy. Well, so that’s our discussion on Saint Adalbert. We find him a very interesting person. He got murdered, and so it was a crime. And the next time you hear from us, we are going to go to Iceland. We’re going to do a special episode just past the Middle Ages. 1596. We would like to talk about Iceland’s only known serial killer who got executed in 1596. So that’s what we’ll do next.

Michelle Butler  36:50 

I am so looking forward to this.

Anne Brannen  36:53 

Iceland, yeah. This has been True Crime Medieval where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. You can find us on Spotify and Apple podcast and all the places where the podcasts are hanging out. We ourselves are at truecrimedieval.com, where you can find links to the podcast and the show notes and transcriptions. We get them up as soon as we can. We were slower on that. We’re slower on the transcriptions than on some other stuff, and rightfully so, because they’re a deal. But anyway, we get them up when we can. And we now have an index. If you are saying to yourselves, well, you know what’s in here, or where is the White Ship, if you want to know things like that, you can go to our index, which has been organized in a kind of totally rambunctious fashion, really, because I don’t know how else to organize medieval crime. So I did that. And you can leave comments and leave messages for us, and yeah, so that’s where we are. Nice to be back. Bye.

Michelle Butler  37:55 

Bye.

110. St. Mikhail of Chernihiv is Assassinated by the Golden Horde, Batu Khan’s Camp, Kyivan Rus, 1246

Anne Brannen  0:21 

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen. I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:30 

And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:34 

And that’s all she’s saying about Tuscaloosa. But what I want to say about Tuscaloosa is that Michelle has just told me that there was a kangaroo that escaped from the petting zoo and jumped up and down the interstate before it was caught. Is this not true, Michelle?

Michelle Butler  0:48 

It is true. You can Google it and find the video. It was in the Washington Post’s List this morning of the five interesting things that have happened overnight.

Anne Brannen  1:00 

And my main question, which Michelle can’t answer and I can’t answer, and I don’t know if anybody’s can is, why the hell would you put a kangaroo in a petting zoo? Because they’re liable to bite you or maybe kick you in the head, which I think would traumatize small children, quite frankly.

Michelle Butler  1:18 

I think a nice calf is a much better choice.

Anne Brannen  1:21 

I’m going with little baby goats, baby goats, little jumpy baby goats. They’re so cute. They’ll jump on you, but they won’t kick you in the head in quite the same way. But we are, we’re True Crime Medieval, and today we are over in what’s now Ukraine, mostly, is where we are. In 1246, Michael of Chernigov refused to worship idols and was executed by Batu Khan of the Golden Horde. So that’s where we are. Chernigov is in Ukraine. It’s up by the border with Belarus. It’s major tourist attraction at the moment–Michelle, did you look up the major tourist attraction for Chernigov?

Michelle Butler  2:01 

No, I didn’t. What is it?

Anne Brannen  2:02 

Well, I’m going to tell you, and you’re going to be sorry you didn’t look it up, but you’ll go and look it up now. It’s the Black Grave, which was excavated first in 1872. It’s got two Norse warriors in there. They were cremated. They date from the time of Vladimir I of the Kievan Rus. Lots of interesting items in the grave, like helmets and halberks. There’s an idol of Thor, which I’d really like to see–I don’t know what they look like–and some decorated auroch horns. So that’s the biggest tourist attraction, and you can go there. Chernigov was second in wealth to Kyiv itself, and the highest in population in what’s now Ukraine, until the Golden Horde sacked it in 1239, which is just four years after our protagonist, Mikhail Vsevolodovich, was killed. Mikhail was born around 1185 after his father, the Grand Prince Yaroslav Yaroslavich–St Alexander Nevsky was his brother–had died on a journey to the Golden Horde. Michael was a pious child, we are told, and very sickly, until he prayed to St Nicholas the Stylite, who actually wasn’t dead at that time. He was actually, like, you know, just being a stylite. And so I don’t think he was a saint then. He was just Nicholas. But now he’s saint. He interceded for him, and Michael got healed completely. So that’s part of his story. He became the prince, the Grand Prince of Novgorod, Chernigov, Kyiv and Galicia, and he first shows up in the chronicles as a public figure in 1223 when, along with a council of other princes at Kyiv, they were debating whether or not to interfere and help the Polovetsians resist the Mongolian hordes. So now–we’re not actually having a side note. What we’re having is a separate branch of this historical brief. The Mongolian hordes. The Mongolian empire was, in the 13th and 14th centuries, the largest contiguous empire in history. All of history. Genghis Khan, who died in 1227, had unified the nomadic tribes. That’s how this all started. Under his direction, and then, under the direction of his descendants, the empire, the Mongolian empire, grew. They sent invading armies out across Asia and Europe. The empire would be split up over succession battles later and begin to break up into different territories in the mid 14th century. But at the time of our protagonist, they were in the process of expanding. The history of the Mongol Empire is vast. So I’m just going to concentrate here on the invasions into Eastern Europe, specifically the Kievan Rus. In 1223, when Michael went to the conference on what to do about the Mongol invasion, the Polovtsians–the Western sources called them the Cumans–I call them both. If you go to look them up, it’ll be easiest to find them under the name Cuman. They were also a nomadic people, but their Slavic name Polovtsky means blonde. So these were blonde nomadic tribe, and the Kievan Rus had been at war with them from 1061 on, especially in Novgorod and Chernigov. They burnt down the Kievan palace and they sacked the Kievan cave monastery. They also invaded Hungary, the Byzantine Empire and Bulgaria. As time went on, along with invading the Rus and Hungary, they allied with the Bulgarians and the Byzantines, and they helped them out in their various battles. Starting in 1220, they resisted the Mongol invasion. The Rus princes sent aid to them then, and so you can note that helping your mortal enemies, the Polovtsians, the Cumans, was more important than leaving them to fight the battle on their own with the Mongols. But after that, the Rus ignored them for a while, unfortunately. They had been yearly attacking Kyv after all, though, until 1223, when the Mongols marched up the Dniester River and the princes organized the war council that Michael attended, that I mentioned earlier, and at that point, at that point, the Rus and the Cumans allied. They were defeated a lot, sort of chaotically. The Golden Horde was that particular branch of the Mongol invasions that took over the northwest section of the empire, from Siberia to the Danube, from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea, and took the territory on up to the Caucasus Mountains. And then the Golden Horde invaded Kiev and Rus in 1237. Michael was the Grand Prince at that time, and the Mongols first massacred the citizens of Ryazan, and then they took northeast Rus. In 1240 they took Kyiv and destroyed it, and that’s actually when we date the end of the Kievan Rus. Before that, Kyiv had been one of the largest cities in the world, and Michael of Chernigov had brought even more prosperity to the city. He had raised commerce in Chernigov. He had strengthened Kyiv as a trading center, as a focus for a trading route, and he had made all sorts of treaties with nearby realms–Poland and Hungary, for instance–and he’d given his nobility more power and freedom. But all of this goes for naught when the Mongols approach. In 1240 they sent out emissaries to Michael, proposing that he surrender. But he wouldn’t negotiate. He then went to Hungary, Poland, and Germany to try and muster a resistance to the Horde. But it was too late. The Rus fell. Hungary fell. Poland fell. Michael went back to Kyiv, which had been razed, and then back to Chernigov, but he still thought that Christian Europe could unite and defeat the Mongols. You know, maybe they could have, but this is just such a force. But he thought that they could still do it, so he sent Metropolitan Peter Akerovich to the Council of Lyon in 1245, calling for a crusade against the Horde. However, the Pope was too busy fighting with Germany, and then Germany attacked Rus, since they were kind of being pretty weak at that point. They wouldn’t. Europe would not unite. Meanwhile, the Khan had sent emissaries to Rus to make a census, because they had to know how many people were there in order to correctly levy the taxes on the populace, and Prince Michael was ordered to submit to the Khan, at which point he was told the Khan would give him a charter that would allow him to rule Rus under the Khan, so he would have the same power he did before, only not really. It’d work really well. That was going to be a very perilous journey. Everybody knew this. Everybody knew this. Nobody thought, Oh, we’re going to go to the Khan and have a little negotiation. Nobody thought that. So he got a blessing from the bishop, and he sent off to be both the prince of the Rus and a confessor, because he was embodying Christianity. He took his friend Theodore with him. This is why you often see pictures of Saint Michael and Saint Theodore together, because they died at the same time, just a few minutes apart. They knew that they were going amongst people who knew very well that he had been trying to get Europe to organize against them, so they were not going to be in a mood to let them survive. You know, the whole charter business being nonsense. So they got there, and they were told that in order to get to the Khan, they had to walk between two fires, and then they had to worship  the fire and the sun as holy entities. But they wouldn’t, because, as Michael said, Christians worship only God who created the world and not the stuff he created. So the Mongols reported that back to Batu Khan. So then the word came back that Michael and Theodore had to do what the pagan priest had told them, or they were going to die in torment, to which, not surprisingly, the answer was that they would submit to Batu Khan because God had given him the rule of the earthly realms–fair enough–but they could not worship idols, which would be in this particular case, the fire and the sun. All right. The bishop had sent them out, not just with blessings, but with the host, because since everybody foresaw that probably things were not going to end well for them, Michael and Theodore prayed, and they had communion, and then the Mongols seized Michael and beat him with sticks and trampled on him. Just before they cut his head off, Michael told Theodore to be strong, because the torment was not going to last long, but the following joy would be eternal. Saint Theodore was then given the same offer–worship the fire idols, you get power. But he wouldn’t do it. So he also got tormented and beheaded as well. The bodies of the two Rus men were thrown outside so that the dogs could eat them. But, we are told, the Lord preserved the bodies until there were some Christians who could secretly bury them appropriately later. Michelle is going to tell you all about this, but what I will just say for now is that wherever they were, wherever they were been, they ended up in Moscow. That whole scene had been so impressive that when the Rus came to the Horde, the Horde no longer demanded that they worship the fire and the sun anymore. That just didn’t happen. Now, they continued to kill the Rus for different reasons. So there’s a whole bunch of martyrs that got created, but they didn’t have to refuse to worship the fire and the sun. Michael’s relatives–his wife, his children, his sister–founded the veneration in various forms, and the veneration was approved in 1547. His successors were princes and important families in the region, as well as a few saints. There were bunches of saints in his line. Michael himself, a martyr and a saint, though not as well known as some other saints, is particularly venerated, of course, in Chernigov. All right. So that’s our story. What happened to the Golden Horde and Kievan Rus and such? Kiev, though having been destroyed, survived, of course. It’s still here. It was conquered by the Lithuanians in 1520 but then recaptured by the Crimean Tatars, an Eastern European Turkish group whose language is descended from Cuman. They were nearly entirely eradicated from Crimea and sent into exile by the Soviets, and recently, that has recurred with the Russians who now occupy Crimea. Kyiv became a part of the Tsardom of Russia in 1667 and more and more russified throughout the 19th century. Ukrainian culture, by that time, was being kept by the lower classes and by Ukraine outside of Kyiv. During World War I, it changed hands 16 times–16 times in World War I–and it then became part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It was then occupied by Nazi Germany in World War II, and then it was part of the Soviet Union, and it became the main city of independent Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union. So Chernigov itself also was part of all those permutations. Then in February 24, 2022, it was completely surrounded by the Russians. It was besieged by the Russians in the full invasion, because taking Chernigov would facilitate getting Kyiv. It’s right on that road. So Chernigov infrastructure failed under repeated bombardment. But the siege was ended when the Ukrainian army recaptured the main road in between Kyiv and Chernigov, and over the next few days, the Russian army withdrew. Besides soldiers killed, Chernigov had lost more than 700 civilians out of a population of about 208,000. It was named a hero city in Ukraine in March. And the Golden Horde? The Golden Horde continued to flourish after the conquest of Kyiv and adopted Islam in the early 14th century, and began to fall apart 100 years later with fighting amongst the various khanates. And in 1480 Ivan, the third of Moscow, defeated the Horde, marking the end of Tatar holdover Russia. Remnants survived until the late 18th century, when the Russian Tsardom expanded kind of over them as for the rest of Europe, the Mongols had killed half the population of Hungary had gone into Poland, Dalmatia, Moravia had gone also into Germany, burning Meissen to the ground, also Croatia, Austria, Bulgaria, Bohemia, though, had held them off while countries, all the countries around them, were ravaged. This is why Wenceslaus, the first is so admirable. Elsewhere, the Mongols continued to rule China until the 14th century, Persia until the 15th century, and India until the 19th century. But back to Europe. In 1242, the Mongols withdrew from Central Europe. Supposedly, this was because the Great Khan had died and they had to go elect a new one. But that’s most probably not really the reason, although that’s what shows up in the Mongolian records, there’s real controversy about that amongst scholars. Some other theories are that the climate had shifted and the steps became marshy, rather than dry, and not something that you could like be the kind of Mongol horsemen fighting people that they were. The sieges has also been very costly and were beginning to not provide much loot, because, you know, you do actually sort of run out out of stuff after things have been taken away from you. For quite some time, lots of men had been lost, even with the victories. Also the Cumans were giving them a bunch of trouble. But the Mongols continued to invade pieces of Europe on into the 19th century, the Qin dynasty took over Mongolia in the mid 18th century, it fell. That dynasty fell in 1911 and Mongolia declared independence, though the Republic of China considered it part of its territory. Bolshevik Russia supported a communist Mongolian army, and Mongolia declared independence in 1921. In 1991 the Soviet Union dissolved, and Mongolia, though it hadn’t been a part of the Union, had been allied with it, and so was really affected by anything that was going on with Soviet Union. Mongolia transitioned from communism to social democracy. So Mongolia is still there, but the Mongolian empire is sort of not, but it got very, very big, and then it kind of sort of lost the outer pieces of it, and now it’s a much smaller country. But that’s our story and our context, and what happens next for our hero of the day, Saint Michael of Chernigov. Michelle, what did you find?

Michelle Butler  17:04 

The sources for the information that we have about Mikhail are pretty interesting. There’s a specific scholar that I would point people to if they’re interested in reading more about this. His name is Michael Dimnick, and he has at least three books about the Chernigov dynasty, and one in particular, about Mikhail all by himself.

Anne Brannen  17:26 

Yay.

Michelle Butler  17:27 

Very useful. It’s from 1981. It was published by the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto, of course, which we are familiar with. So that one, obviously, is the one that I used the most. We have chronicle sources, and they’re really quite fast, but they’re also infused with hagiography quite quickly. So it’s not something where the story kind of accumulates later. It’s there as soon as it’s being written down in the chronicles. It has the hagiography there. You’ve got the Novgorod First Chronicle, the Hypatian Chronicle, the Laurentian Chronicle. You have an account of Mikhail’s death from a contemporary, which I think is really interesting. He wasn’t present at the time, but he was in Mongolia. This is Friar John de Plano Carpini. He had been sent there by Pope Innocent the third to try to evangelize the Tartars, which sounds like a terrible job. This sounds like it’s not going to go well at all. He was sent there in 1245 and he ends up spending two years in Mongolia trying to get some traction, but he didn’t.

Anne Brannen  18:38 

And they didn’t make him look at fires or say anything? They left him alone?

Michelle Butler  18:43 

Yeah.

Anne Brannen  18:44 

This is one of the ways we know that whole thing about ‘you have to  walk through the fires.’ That really was not the point. They were going to kill him anyway.

Michelle Butler  18:50 

Yeah.

Anne Brannen  18:52 

They don’t care whether you worship the fires.

Michelle Butler  18:54 

Exactly. The friar was not treated like this. Nobody listened to him, but he wasn’t treated like this. But he heard about Mikhail’s execution during his journey and wrote about it.

Anne Brannen  19:07 

He heard this from the Mongols, the Tatars?

Michelle Butler  19:10 

Yeah. He heard about it. So it’s a very close contemporary account. It’s not an eyewitness account, but it’s very close in time. He actually does make the point, Friar John, that others did not worship but were not executed, including himself. There are also church narratives that start very quickly, and there’s quite a lot. I was actually surprised by how many manuscripts exist. They–the two, Mikhail and Theodore–were among saints named in the opening prayer before the liturgy in Novgorod, because you remember that the liturgy has a space for local saints, at the beginning. By the end of the 14th century, they were being named in that opening prayer. In local versions of the liturgy, there’s a special service that invokes them. More than 20 copies of that survives.

Anne Brannen  20:08 

So that’s for, like, I think it was the 20th of September, right?

Michelle Butler  20:09 

That is their feast day. More than 90 copies of the four different versions of his vita survive, which is huge. It’s huge.

Anne Brannen  20:24 

Now, who wrote the Vita?

Michelle Butler  20:25 

There’s four categories of manuscripts. His wife sponsored one of them, and then he also shows up in the vita of his daughter. The daughter that became a nun has her own vita, and so there are versions of her story that tell his. You had talked about the importance of his family, with getting this veneration started, because he is survived by his wife, the married daughter, and the daughter who becomes a nun.

Anne Brannen  20:54 

There’s a whole list of children.

Michelle Butler  20:56 

But the wife and the daughters are particularly at the forefront of establishing him as a martyr. He and Theodore are the first martyrs–they’re not the first of the Kievan Rus to be canonized, but they’re the first martyrs to be canonized. 

Anne Brannen  21:12 

That would be Olga and Vladimir, yeah?

Michelle Butler  21:14 

Yeah. Exactly, exactly. The relics of Saint Mikhail and Saint Theodore have several moves before they end up in Moscow. They are first taken to Chernigov and entombed in the Cathedral of the Transfiguration. In the 1570s, the relics are moved to Moscow by Tsar Ivan the fourth to a new cathedral built for that purpose. It’s named for them, and it is built for them. Dimnick, the scholar, talks about how the czars had a particular interest in Mikhail, that because he was a prince who was also a saint, that the czars felt that he would have a particular interest in their problems, in interceding on their behalf.

Anne Brannen  22:07 

So he’s like a patron saint of the princes.

Michelle Butler  22:12 

Exactly. Two hundred years later–so in the 18th century–that cathedral was demolished.

Anne Brannen  22:18 

Oh, damn.

Michelle Butler  22:19 

The saints’ remains were moved, first to the Cathedral of the Purification and then to the Cathedral of Saint Michael the Archangel, into a silver shrine that was given in thanks by Catherine the second who had prayed to Saint Michael for intervention in brokering a peace deal.

Anne Brannen  22:41 

Okay, so he’s still being a patron saint to the princes. All right.

Michelle Butler  22:47 

That silver shrine, alas, was pillaged during the Napoleonic invasion of Moscow.

Anne Brannen  22:54 

Oh, my God. That’s interesting. Okay, so everybody got out of Moscow, and Napoleon took some things, and then they all, kind of–most everybody–died on the road back to France. Okay. Fine.

Michelle Butler  23:07 

After which the relics were placed in a bronze tomb, and that is what they are still in. And I have a link where people can see images of that.

Anne Brannen  23:19 

So when Napoleon took Moscow, after everybody had gotten out of it and whatnot, they took the silver relic box, and they tossed out the relics, and they took the silver box. Is that what you’re telling me?

Michelle Butler  23:32 

Yeah, they left the bones. They took the silver. 

Anne Brannen  23:34 

Okay, well, I guess that’s good, because now we still have that.

Michelle Butler  23:40 

I know it was a crappy thing for the Russians to take these things, to take the relics back to Moscow, but they’re the only ones that survive of any of these saints. None of the relics of Saint Olga survives, none of the relics of Saint Vladimir, and they survived because they were taken to Moscow, because the czars were like, Hey, this is our guy.

Anne Brannen  24:00 

Right, right. He was one to preserve. Interesting. He remained–because of being in the liturgy, because of being so well known from there–he remains a patron saint in Chernigov.

Michelle Butler  24:11 

He is–both of them, actually, Mikhail and Theodore–are popular subjects for church art, for icons. There’s specific…this is a little lengthy, but it’s kind of cool. There are iconographers handbooks that give specific instructions for how you’re supposed to portray them. So here is the quote. “Mikhail’s hair is light brown and curly. His beard is similar to that of John the Precursor, but has streaks of gray. He wears a rose-colored damask fur coat, and his upper garment is sky blue, colored with vermillion and white. His lower garment is sky blue and damask. He holds a cross in his right hand, while his left hand rests on his sword, which is sheathed in its scabbard. Theodore, on the other hand, has gray hair, which is curled slightly around his ears. His beard is longer than that of Saint Athanasius and also whiter. He, like the prince, is wearing a fur coat. His top garment is light blue and damask in color, and his lower garment is vermilion. In his hands, which are to be portrayed in a praying position, he holds a church.” I found this fascinating. The detail.

Anne Brannen  25:19 

I love the sword in the sheath with his hand on it, not fighting–able to, but not fighting. Yeah, great images. I love all those icons. There’s a lot. There’s also some really sort of–I don’t know what the word is I want to use for, but there’s some very dramatic 19th century paintings from the area.

Michelle Butler  25:41 

Yes, I saw those. There are miniatures, there are frescoes, there are liturgical vessels, there are churches named for them. But it’s difficult to know how many were, because many of them were those wooden churches, and they don’t survive.

Anne Brannen  25:57 

I have a friend who goes to one of those wooden churches. This is in the Carpathians. But it’s kind of been…it’s not all wooden. It’s been reinforced with lots of other stuff. It’s an ancient church, but it’s still there. But, you know, it’s not all wood anymore.

Michelle Butler  26:15 

I did not find a lot of pop culture about Saint Mikhail. I did find some about Batu Khan. There are novels about Batu Khan.

Anne Brannen  26:31 

Wow.

Michelle Butler  20:08 

Isn’t that interesting? Including, and I thought this was very interesting, historical novels by a Russian Soviet writer, Vasily Yan, and he has a trilogy. One is about Genghis Khan. That book is from 1939. Batu Khan, 1942, and To The Last Sea, 1955 and together, it’s a trilogy called Invasion of the Mongols, and it tells of the conquests of the Mongol Tatar tribes of the 13th century.

Anne Brannen  26:58 

So he’s writing them during the war.

Michelle Butler  27:05 

Yeah. Very, very interesting. There’s a couple of other novels that I found about Batu Khan. The most fascinating story I found connected to Batu Khan is Russian Atlantis. Did you run into this?

Anne Brannen  27:20 

No, I didn’t. Please do tell.

Michelle Butler  27:24 

Oh, my goodness gracious. This story is not medieval. It shows up later. It’s more like a 17th or 18th century story. So it’s very interesting that it gets connected to Batu Khan. But the story is that there’s this city by Lake Svetloyar, and the army of the Golden Horde follows a local to it and finds this secret city. To their surprise, the town has no fortifications, no walls, no nothing. And they think, buhaha, this is going to be easy. As they rush to attack it, water comes fountaining up, and the city sinks into the lake.

Anne Brannen  28:18 

Wow, that’s a great story.

Michelle Butler  28:21 

Isn’t that wild? The last thing they see is the sparkling dome of the cathedral with a cross on it, and it’s the last thing to sink into the waves.

Anne Brannen  28:30 

So is it like Brigadoon, and sometimes it comes back and you can see it, or is it like gone, gone, gone?

Michelle Butler  28:35 

It’s more like Atlantis. But this is a massive popular…there’s so much pop culture about this.

Anne Brannen  28:45 

I had never heard of it.

Michelle Butler  28:46 

This is such an amazing story. It’s called Kitezh–k, i, t, e, z, h–is the name of the city. It is like Atlantis. It’s said that some people can still find their way there. The road to the lake is sometimes called the path of Batu. Some people claim to be able to hear the bells or people singing from under the waters of the lake. It shows up in opera. It shows up in poems. It’s in Russian folklore. The filmmaker Werner Herzog made a documentary called Bells from the Deep in 1993. It shows up in science fiction. It shows up in Lara Cross: Tomb Raider. It’s a really, really big story. And I had never heard of this either.

Anne Brannen  29:37 

I had not, but I see, looking at this, that the city’s in the Novgorod Oblast.

Michelle Butler  29:41 

The city sinks into the lake rather than being sacked by the Mongols.

Anne Brannen  29:46 

Well, I think that’s a pretty good move, because then you can continue for eternity being all glittery and stuff, you know, and just kind of exhibit yourself every once in a while. I think that’s a good move for a city, really.

Michelle Butler  29:56 

It was apparently God who saved them.

Anne Brannen  29:59 

Well. Of course.

Michelle Butler  30:00 

So that’s a miracle.

Anne Brannen  30:01 

Yeah.

Michelle Butler  30:02 

Cool. That’s a cool story.

Anne Brannen  30:04 

I love that so much. Thank you very much. The Russian Atlantis. I know of other stories of cities or towns that are submerged in lakes, you know, across Europe that you can see sometimes or hear the bells. I had never heard of that one, and especially like, specifically connected to the Mongols.

Michelle Butler  30:24 

That is all I have. You know, once I found Russian Atlantis, I’m like, I’m done here, my work here is done. I do have a pretty long list of sources that I found.

Anne Brannen  30:37 

Oh, good.

Michelle Butler  30:38 

Various books about Michael of Chernigov. This one from 1981 is really good, very informative and detailed and nicely readable. It’s always nice when you get a hold of an academic work that doesn’t make your eyes cross.

Anne Brannen  30:54 

Even if you’re an academic. You didn’t come across any pop literature?

Michelle Butler  31:00 

No.

Anne Brannen  31:01 

You know, it’s perfect opera, I would think. I mean, why isn’t there an opera?

Michelle Butler  31:08 

I was surprised by that, actually.

Anne Brannen  31:12 

Yeah, this is opera. There we are. That’s our work on Saint Michael of Chernigov and all the interesting things around him, including Russian Atlantis, which is connected somehow. The next time you hear from us, we are going to go to Constantinople. We’ve been there before because we were talking about the fall of Constantinople, which is the point at which the Eastern and Western Christian churches completely broke and then didn’t really talk to each other for hundreds and hundreds of years. But we’re going next to the massacre of the Latins in Constantinople. What year is that, Michelle?

Michelle Butler  31:51 

1182.

Anne Brannen  31:53 

1182. So not so far actually, from this time, but a little ways away. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. We can be found on Spotify and Apple and all the places where the podcasts are hanging out. You can reach us directly at truecrime medieval.com, true crime medieval is all one word. There you can find the show notes and transcriptions when we get them up, and links to the podcast and whatever little description I’ve stuck together with some really wonderful illustration. I will admit that I do love finding illustrations for these things.

Michelle Butler  32:38 

Yeah, there’s that painting.

Anne Brannen  32:41 

Yes. I don’t believe a minute of that painting. There’s not a single thing in that painting that is true. But you know, I do love those. Like that one, you remember, for the scandal of Tour de Nesle? I’ve got that wonderful Victorian engraving where, like, they seem to be sitting in some kind of Victorian pub, I don’t know.

Michelle Butler  33:06 

The Cadaver Synod painting was also a really nice 19th century.

Anne Brannen  33:10 

Yes.

Michelle Butler  33:11 

Scandal.

Anne Brannen  33:12 

Yeah, that was a really, really godawful looking dead Pope there. Anyway. So we have all that stuff, and also an index. There’s an index. There’s an index so that you can find things. I’m very proud of this index. It’s organized under completely–I can’t tell you how I organized it, because it’s kind of organized the way I think. But I think you can find stuff in it if you just kind of run through. And you can reach us there, and you can leave suggestions for us if there’s crimes that we don’t know about. In fact, Michelle, you need to go look at the comments, because we have another suggestion.

Michelle Butler  33:48 

On the website or on Facebook?

Anne Brannen  33:50 

On the website.

Michelle Butler  33:51 

Okay.

Anne Brannen  33:53 

Yes. Very nice. Russian, I think, if I remember this right, but I have to look. Maybe not.

Michelle Butler  33:59 

I’ve run across a couple too. There was one where the Vikings invade and capture the Archbishop of Canterbury and then accidentally kill him, because they have him locked up in a cage and throw bones at him for funsies.

Anne Brannen  34:16 

Oh god. We have to shoehorn that one in as soon as possible. Oh, my god. Yeah, go look that up and add that to our list. Oh, yeah, that’s us. Bye.

Michelle Butler  34:35 

Bye.

104. Special Episode: Abd Allah ibn Ali invites the Umayyades to a Banquet and Slaughters Them, Palestine 750

Anne Brannen  0:24 

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I’m your host in Albuquerque,

Michelle Butler  0:33 

I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:37 

Today we’ve got a special episode. Not because we’re going further in time–most of our special episodes are down in the early modern era–but because we’re going to go on over to Egypt and Iraq and Syria, because we have a horrible crime, which was suggested to us by one of our listeners. Thank you very much. So we went to look it up. So we’re going to be in Egypt. We want to talk about the massacre of the Umayyads, because we think there was one, although we’ll be explaining the caveats later. What’s going on is that in 750, Marwan the second, who is the caliph of the Umayyad caliphate, was killed in Egypt in a battle with the Abbasids. He was killed at the Battle of the Great Zab River, and after that, the Abbasids killed a massive number of Umayyads, with one of them surviving. One member of the dynasty survived, and he escaped to Spain and founded an Umayyad dynasty there. Okay. But we always ask, how did we get here? I’m going to provide an enormously condensed version of how we ended up here, enormously condensed because it’s complex. After the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 CE, the first caliphate, the Rashidun caliphate had four caliphs–that’s the political and religious ruler that succeeds the prophet–and that lasted from 632 to 661, and got overthrown in a civil war. The Umayyad caliphate followed. So that’s when the Umayyads start. In 661 they had been a tribe in Mecca that had a lot of political power in the region, and they had opposed Muhammad, actually, until 630 when he captured Mecca and the leaders converted. They went to Medina, and then after the death of the Prophet, they continued to grow under the Rashidun caliphate. The third of the Rashidun caliphs was actually a member of the Umayyad clan, related by marriage to the prophet, and he favored the Umayyads and gave them powerful positions to newly conquered regions, and he was advised by Umayyad relatives. Fair enough. Resentment against him on account of that grew until he was assassinated in 656. The next caliph, Ali al Zubayr Ibn Al awam, who was a cousin of the prophets, was immediately challenged, but he won a battle, and then he was on more on solid ground for a bit, but the governor of Syria, who was Muawiyah the first, accused Ali of having assassinated his predecessor, who was related to Muawiyah the first, and also he feared that Ali would weaken his hold over Syria, so he went to war. There was a battle that neither side won, and the negotiations afterwards caused Ali to look weak, because he was negotiating with this guy instead of, you know, just winning everything and not treating him as an equal, and so his support fell apart. Then the person he had been fighting, Muawiyah, was recognized as caliph in Syria. In 660 Ali got assassinated. In 661 Muawiyah was declared caliph by the Iraqis, and he took the treasury to Damascus and made that the capital. That’s the beginning of the Umayyad caliphate. So I’m telling you all this–and there’s going to be more of it–because it gives the background to the massacre that is the crime that we’re focusing on today. To make it understandable as to why it’s happening, we had to figure all these things out. We’re much more used to England and France, actually. So our massacre marks the end of the Umayyad caliphate. We heard how it just started. Muawiyah attempted to unify the Muslims, but there was strong opposition to any kind of central government. That wasn’t really what a lot of people wanted. And the thing was, that as the realm moved out further and further, as people got conquered, they could become Muslim, or perhaps they didn’t. But Muslims did not have to pay the poll tax that the non-Muslims did. So you might think that you would want to be Muslim theoretically because you believe and you would have converted, but also maybe because you didn’t want to pay the poll tax, although the Umayyads were not very good about letting people not pay the poll tax. Anyway, he was trying to unify things, and one of the things he did was limit some of the Umayyad power of his caliphate because he was trying to share the power more or less in the name of unification. That is problematic. His son, Yazid seceded him, was immediately challenged by the Iraqis, and then he killed the Prophet’s grandson, Husayn,in battle, which undermined his support–wouldn’t you just think–and undermined the support for the Umayyads, who were then thrown out of Medina, and there was a revolt in Mecca. Yazid died, and his son succeeded him, and then died soon after, and Marwan–Marwan Ibn Al hakam–that’s who we’re actually coming to, we’re now landing at the time period of the crime we’re getting to–he was elected caliph by some Syrian tribes. He fought an army of the Northern Syrians and won that, but the foundation of his power in Syria was undermined by that particular fight with the northern Syrians. Iraq was also unstable, and there was a rebellion there against the Umayyads in 700 which was suppressed. The Umayyads defeated the Byzantines, and they annexed Anatolia. They captured Carthage. They defeated the Berbers. They conquered most of Hispania. They took Samarkand and Bukhara and demolished the Zoroastrian temples there. They attempted to capture Constantinople, but they got soundly defeated. Then there were more revolts in Iraq, and there was more war against the Byzantines, and there was war with the Khazars, and there was war with the Franks. The western expansion ended with the battles of Toulouse and Tours. Morocco rebelled after that and became independent, which it was until, like, the 20th century. In the east, they were defeated in India, and they didn’t ever subdue the Khazars, though they got as far north as the Volga. Okay. So they were busy. We finally come to Marwan the second who was proclaimed Caliph in Damascus in 744, after which he moved the capital to Haran. Iraq was still a problem for him, but the main problem was the Abbasids. They claimed authority because Abu Hashim had named Muhammad ibn Ali as his successor, and they had missions. They worked on getting support for themselves by sending out missions to gain support for “a member of the family of the Prophet,” without really saying who it was for. But, you know, supporting a member of the family of the Prophet. So they had been able to get some wide support, scattered around. In 747, during Ramadan, they staged an open revolt against the Umayyads, and they flew the black flag. The black flag was one of the prophet’s flags. It’s all black. That’s what it is. It’s black. It’s not like they’re flying a black flag with bones on it. No, no, it’s just black. So they flew the black flag, and Marwan fought them at the Battle of the Great Zab River, which you remember I mentioned when I was telling you what we were going to be doing, and he lost. About 300 Umayyads died at that point, and the Abbasids took Damascus, and they killed Marwan, who had fled through Jordan and Palestine and was finally captured in Egypt. So that’s the year 750 in August–750 CE–so really, that’s kind of it for the Umayyads, more or less. The Abbasids declared Abu al Abbas al-Saffah the caliph. The Abbasids’ reaction to having won all of this–it was extraordinarily bloody and brutal, which I think is a good thing to remind ourselves of, because when we tell you about what’s going to happen to the Umayyads, it’s very important to not think, ‘well, that’s what they’re all doing over there.’ Because that’s not true. This was unusually–even without the story that is probably made up–it was unusually bloody and brutal. Happy to tell you this is not the usual thing over there. So al-Saffah, the new caliph, took the capital to Kufa, and his supporters were given a bunch of power. But he was worried about the Umayyads, because, you know, there could be a counter uprising. It’s that kind of thing, where if you’re a new king, you have to kill all the little children because somebody might say, here’s the real king, you know, and then have a war. You can’t do that. So he’s worried about them. So he probably invited the Umayyads to a banquet, and he had them massacred. He had the remaining male members of the family hunted down and killed. Although the Umayyad dynasty continued in Spain because the only male survivor fled to Cordoba, and so established the Umayyad dynasty there, which actually will go on for quite some time. But anyway, they then tore apart the tombs of the Umayyads in Syria. They desecrated them. They burned all the bones of the dead. Now the crime that we’re focused on is the blood feast, the feast where the Umayyads get invited to eat something and they are all killed. We’ve got a whole lot of tellings of this awful story, with various versions, all boiling down to a blood feast and desecration of tombs, but it isn’t entirely clear that it happened, at least not in the way that it’s been given down to us. Absolutely the Umayyads, they got killed, whole bunches of them, dead, dead, dead. Absolutely. The blood feast as it’s given is not necessarily true, which Michelle is going to explain to you later, because it’s like the black dinner in Scotland, when the young Douglasses were supposedly invited to a feast where there’s going to be negotiations, but instead, the head of a black bull is slammed down on the table, and that’s how they know they’re going to die. And the young King James, the boy King James, weep, weep, weep, ‘Don’t kill the Douglass,’ but they slaughter them right there–which actually does not happen. There wasn’t even really a feast. They invited them over under false pretenses, yes, but then they just killed them in the courtyard. But the blood feast was a great story, wasn’t it? So that’s what everybody thinks happened. Nice details, but not true. Were the Umayyads invited to a feast and killed? I expect, yes, probably because that’s one of the ways to get a whole bunch of people into the same room. We’ve seen that happen several times in True Crime Medieval. Because that happens a lot. It’s a good method. But the details that come down to us, we’re like, hmmm, so I’m now going to tell you the supposed details. If you’re the kind of people who don’t need to listen to dreadful things, you might want to skip ahead a little. Here’s the details. Abdallah Ibn Ali pursued Marwan to Palestine. The Umayyads had been in hiding, but Abdallah invited them to Nahr Abi Futrus, promising gifts or, you know, or amnesty–something or other. And he got hired hit men with clubs posted all around. Then a poet came in–the poet’s important–the poet came in and recited a poem that blamed the Umayyads for horrible things, murders and stuff, and called them dogs from hell. That’s really bad, which one of them objected to, but is told to shut up by Abdallah, who then, remembering the beloved people that the Umayyads have killed, claps his hands and the hit men club all the guests to death, or kind of actually almost to death, because Abdullah has rugs thrown over the bodies while they are still moving, and then he serves dinner on them, and he eats while the dying are moaning. After that, he besieged Damascus during Ramadan and slaughters the rest of the Umayyads. Also he orders all the previously dead Umayyads, you know, the dead before the massacre, be taken out of their tombs and burnt. So that’s the story. Exactly what happened we’ll talk about in a bit. That’s the end of the Umayyad caliphate. Even disregarding the blood feast, and you know, the rugs and the moaning guests, that’s the end of the caliphate in Egypt, except though the caliphate in Spain, the survivor who founded it said was actually the authentic and true caliphate. But nobody else actually believed this. But that went on. That caliphate lasted until the 16th century. The Abbasids consolidated their power by killing off other rivals too. It wasn’t just the Umayyads, you need to know, and their brutality spurred rebellions. They centered their capital in the new city of Baghdad, and they ruled over a kind of cosmopolitan and diverse society. But by 861, they were kind of nominal rulers. They were just ruling in name. They continued as caliphs until 1517 when the Ottoman Sultan Salem the first defeated the Mamluks and made Egypt part of the Ottoman Empire. So, you know, then that was the end of that. But really, you know, they were, at least, were serving in name for quite some time.

Michelle Butler  13:57 

Yeah, I was really interested in that. How long that caliphate–

Anne Brannen  14:01 

In name, but yeah, by the ninth century, they are not really in power anymore. The Muslims ruled in Spain until the 15th century. 1492 of course. But I think that that caliphate, yeah, 1031. It lasts until 1031 and then somebody else takes over. So, Michelle, what have you got?

Michelle Butler  14:21 

This was a giant fun research quest.

Anne Brannen  14:24 

Yay. There was more on it than there was on saffron, huh?

Michelle Butler  14:27 

It was a more successful sort of quest. This was a challenging topic, because that area of the world, it’s not my specialty, and so I was really starting from scratch, but it was really great actually to go and read. I ended up reading severalbackground books, starting from the beginning and going up through the first two caliphates to find out what the background was. That was really helpful. But as I was doing that reading, it became intriguingly clear that there wasn’t actually a scholarly consensus, or there was discussion about whether the massacre took place as you described it, inthat particular way. What was interesting to me, then, was trying to track down what people thought about it and where that idea came from.

Anne Brannen  15:26 

Uh huh.

Michelle Butler  15:27 

What was the earliest mention we had? That became my quest. What is the earliest record we have of the massacre as described that way. What I found is that in contemporary–20th and 21st century–scholarship, you have an interesting collection of approaches, let’s say. There’s an influential book that probably should not have been as influential as it was called A History of Medieval Islam by JJ Saunders. It was published by Rutledge in 1965 and then reprinted 1972, printed for the first time in paperback in 1978, reprinted 1980 and 1982. So that is an indication of a book that is being read and being sold, because you don’t keep reprinting a book that nobody wants. Frustratingly, what he says about this is “the graves of the Umayyad caliphs, with the single exception of that of the pious Omar, were broken open and the corpses torn out and burned and the new caliph’s uncle, Abdullah, perpetrated a deed of outstanding infamy. Trusting to his solemn promises, 80 princes of the fallen houses accepted his invitation to a banquet. At a given signal, a band of executioners entered the room and clubbed them all to death. Leather and covers were spread over the bodies, and the host and his friends feasted upon them, to the sounds of their victims’ dying groans.” So part and parcel of the account that you provided before.

Anne Brannen  17:14 

I got my details out of one of the early, the most precise of one of the early ones, the early chroniclers, the early Muslim chroniclers.

Michelle Butler  17:22 

This was profoundly frustrating, because he does not cite a source for that.

Anne Brannen  17:27 

No! What a shame. And he didn’t make it up out of his head, because we have lots of chronicles that say this in one form or another.

Michelle Butler  17:39 

I assume that in 1965 the reason he’s not citing a source for this, my assumption would be that was because everybody knew about it. You don’t have to cite a source. Everybody knows. Well, something happens over the course of the next 20 years, because by 1980 Jacob Lassner’s The Shaping of Abbasid Rule, which is published by Princeton University Press–this is the most detailed discussion I found in any of the books I looked at, which were several. He has three whole pages about it. But the most important thing he says is this, “the difficulties posed by the numerous conflicting traditions,” and I have to add in here ‘of the massacre,’ because that’s obvious from the context, but this is from about the end of his discussion, “have long been recognized, and the suggestion that the extirpation of the Umayyad house was carried out at different historical moments by a number of notables and over a wide geographic area, seems quite plausible.” He goes through all these different accounts over the course of three pages, which is about 10 times as much as anybody else does, and concludes that there isn’t a single moment at which most of the killings happen. That the killings happen, but they happen at several places by a number of people. That essentially several members of the Abbasid ruling party are sent out with the express purpose to find them and kill them.

Anne Brannen  19:19 

So there isn’t…only is there not a banquet with the rugs and the dying people, there’s massacres kind of like all over.

Michelle Butler  19:27 

Yes.

Anne Brannen  19:29 

That actually makes more sense, doesn’t it?

Michelle Butler  19:31 

That is what he concludes from the research that he looks at. The other books I looked at pretty much have one or two sentences each. There’s about half a dozen more. The First Dynasty of Islam: the Umayyad Caliphate AD 661 – 750, by GR Hawting, 1986, says “in numerous places, members of the Umayyad family were rounded up and killed, only those who went into hiding escaping.”

Anne Brannen  20:02 

No mention like ‘some people said there was a massacre in a banquet, but we’re not saying that.’  Not even that. Okay.

Michelle Butler  20:09 

Hugh Kennedy is an important scholar in this area. I have several–1, 2, 3…I don’t own these books. I went and pillaged the library. I’m bringing them back to the university very soon. If anybody else is trying to do research right now, they’re probably wondering, What on earth happened? I have three of Hugh Kennedy’s books sitting here. He’s a very important scholar in this area. His book from 1986, which is one of his first books, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates, has this to say. He has set up before this that after the Abbasids take over, they reach out to other families and proclaim a general reconciliation. Except for the Umayyads, they’re specifically excluded. Then he says, quote, “all the prominent Umayyads were hunted down, and many of them executed by Abdul Allad de Ali, which is the uncle of the first Abbasid caliph, when he took over Syria. So Kennedy has a slightly different perspective, in that he has a particular person who he thinks was responsible for sending out the death squads and coordinating them. Same thing in Amira K.  Bennison’s The Great Caliphs: “The Abbasids took Damascus and massacred all the Umayyad men they could get hold of at Ramla in Palestine, 72 according to Al Tabiri.

Anne Brannen  21:45 

So we’re all in consensus that the Umayyads got almost all entirely killed?

Michelle Butler  21:51 

Yes, and the other three or four of them I looked at, that’s what they say too. You got one or two sentences saying the Abbasids went around and hunted up the Umayyads and killed them.

Anne Brannen  22:05 

But we’re not in consensus about how and where and how many people were involved in it, right?

Michelle Butler  22:10 

Nobody was answering my question about where this story came from, if everybody was willing to say–except for the first guy who didn’t provide a source–if everybody was willing to say, well, that didn’t happen like that, but it did happen. They did go out and murder everybody, but not by inviting them to a banquet and killing everybody in one go and then having dinner on top of them, which feels like it would be lumpy and hard to do.

Anne Brannen  22:39 

Yeah, you know, even to make a point that’s just too silly. Besides, who are you making a point to? They’re all dead.

Michelle Butler  22:44 

Then one of them mentioned an article. Finally, the mystery was solved, because I found out that the reason that nobody was talking about this is that in 1950 there was an article published in French that had already done this work.

Anne Brannen  23:11 

So that was like, nobody else had to do it, because it had been done so well.

Michelle Butler  23:15 

Yes, but also nobody else wanted to go and look at it and give a little synopsis in English, which would have been so helpful. So there’s an article in French by Sabatino Moscati. I gather he’s writing in French, but he’s in Rome. Being European is cool. The ability to work in other languages. My French is good enough to know that this was important and where I was going to find the information I needed, and not good enough to actually do that without some serious, serious work and a dictionary and Google. But fortunately, yours is.

Anne Brannen  23:59 

It was good enough.

Michelle Butler  24:03 

So the reason I have the answer is that you were able to go through and do this.

Anne Brannen  24:11 

Just in case, if anybody is wondering, why we are not providing my translation, which Michelle actually said might be a good idea, is that my translation absolutely can tell Michelle what is going on, but in many places, it sounds kind of like that time when Mark Twain got the French translation of the Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and then translated it back into English. Sometimes my translation sounds a little like that, and so we’re not putting it on the net.

Michelle Butler  24:44 

That makes sense to me, but I will just throw out there that it would be super useful for somebody to do an actual scholarly translation of this article. It is from 1950 and it is really, really needed.

Anne Brannen  25:00 

If somebody would do that translation, you know, and not have it sound like the second English version of the jumping frog, that would be great.

Michelle Butler  25:08 

It’s not a super long article.

Anne Brannen  25:11 

No, but it seems kind of long when you’re in there trying to–

Michelle Butler  25:13 

Oh for sure, for sure. I just meant that for somebody who’s a translator, it’s not like you’re signing up to do a whole book.

Anne Brannen  25:18 

Oh no, no. It’s not a whole book. It’s like a 20 page article, and you get used to the Arabic pretty soon.

Michelle Butler  25:24 

Not trying to downplay the work that you did, because it was really important and helpful, but now we have an answer to the question.

Anne Brannen  25:31 

Okay. So what is the answer to the question?

Michelle Butler  25:33 

The answer is that this shows up for the first time in a ninth century source.

Anne Brannen  25:41 

Well, that’s a little later, isn’t it, than when this thing happened?

Michelle Butler  25:45 

Yes.

Anne Brannen  25:46 

And often we say, well, that probably isn’t what happened, is it.

Michelle Butler  25:52 

There are several ninth century sources, and they all mention that there was killing. The differences among them are interesting. So one 9 century source, Ibn Quitaba, says that there was a killing of over 80 Umayyads. Okay, fine. That’s in this particular city, Nahr Abi Futrus in Palestine. Okay, awesome. The next one. Allah Baduri, also ninth century, says that, and this is where we get a little bit more–the promise of security, the promise of safety, if they come out. The uncle, Abdullah ibn Ali, comes to that same city, that the other one mentioned, lures the Umayyads out of hiding with promises. So you have the treachery there, and then, when everyone was gathered together, has soldiers burst into the hall and kill everybody with clubs. So you know, a bit more detail. Another ninth century source, Dinawari, tells us that you have 80 killed. Okay, fine. Then we have Yakibi burst on the scene, still in the ninth century, but a little bit later, and he’s the one with this whole big, detailed version of it.

Anne Brannen  27:22 

So that’s the first. That’s the first. It’s not just that he doesn’t show up till the ninth century. It’s that we have things that were written before him that do not mention all the rugs on top of the dying guests.

Michelle Butler  27:31 

They’re not a lot before him. It’s not like this is a span of 200 years. They’re all roughly ninth century, but Moscati puts them in chronological order, and so they’re near contemporaries, but this one is so much more detailed that he is either making this up out of his head or–and Moscati doesn’t say this, but this would be my guess, and I sure would like somebody else to come back to Moscati’s article and dig into it, because Moscati really is just providing the listing of the sources and a little bit of analysis. It would be so helpful for somebody who is an actual specialist in this area to come back and do a more detailed interpretation, particularly in light of all the other work that has been done over the last 75 years.

Anne Brannen  28:21 

It seems to me it’s an important thing to talk about. I mean, it’s a sort of central piece of the movement of power and history.

Michelle Butler  28:30 

I would very much like this mythical scholar who is doing my bidding to explain to me why it is that Yakibi is motivated to do this. What is going on? Do we think that he has a particular beef with the Abbasids, so he wants to make them look bad? Or is he reporting…do we think that he is reporting oral history that is current at that point? I would really, really like to know, and I do not have an answer to that. What I do know is that this is where the pieces that are showing up later, that the story as it comes down to us, that there’s treachery, that there’s a promise that they’re going to be okay, that they’re going to get amnesty, that they come to the banquet, that there is a poet there who comes in and poetically starts insulting the Umayyads, and that there is a death squad waiting, and they come in and club them to death. That’s is a detail which is important. They don’t come in with the stabbing or the strangling. It’s the clubbing to death which seems unnoble. You club dogs to death. You know what I mean. It’s not a noble death to give your enemy. And then the whole thing with the rugs and bringing the food in and eating on top of the dying–all of that is in this account, which means that my mythical scholar who is doing what I am asking will come and explain to me, why here? why now? why him? So I cannot go any further with it, but that is what I’ve got. So thank you ever so much for doing that article.

Anne Brannen  30:17 

You are very welcome. Because the killing of the Umayyads, the suggestion that we have to get rid of our enemies, or they might cause us a problem otherwise–that’s just how that is. Those details make it something that is quite off. That it wasn’t before.

Michelle Butler  30:33 

There is an interesting, related, intriguing omission from another scholar that I would also like an answer to. This is Al Tabari, who is also ninth century. I can’t even tell you how big his history is. I have the one volume I went to the library and checked out. There’s a whole bunch more. The volume sitting on my desk here is the history of Al Tabari–so Al Tabari is the author–volume 27: the Abbasid revolution. He is telling the history of the world, starting with Adam and Eve, and we are barely at the beginning of Islamic history. We’re in volume 27. It goes up to 872, which is when he died. So it’s really, really interesting–and Moscati, the author of the article, points to this–that Tabari’s history is very, very long, and he only gives us two lines about the killing of the Umayyads.

Anne Brannen  31:39 

That is a very good point.

Michelle Butler  31:42 

So I would also like to know what is motivating Al Tabari’s silence. I would like to know the previous author whose name I’m forgetting at the moment..Yakibi…I would like to know about his effusiveness and potentially inventiveness. I would very much like to know about Al Tabari’s silence.

Anne Brannen  32:04 

Yeah, because what it seems like I’m hearing is that they got killed, and there was not a whole bunch of dramatic details, dramatic nasty details. That’s not what happened. That got added as part of the literature and came into history. That was not it.

Michelle Butler  32:21 

Tabari says just real, real concisely that Abdullah ibn Ali, the uncle, killed 72 Umayyads at Nahr ibn Futrus, the same city. So that part’s consistent. And then that’s it. He clearly likes to talk. We have the bazillions of volumes. So what is going on with that?

Anne Brannen  32:45 

It sounds more reliable.

Michelle Butler  32:47 

Moscati, your translation of it, is really interesting. This strange laconicism raises the question, does he write to be favorable towards the Abbasids, wanting to reduce the narratives which could reflect badly on the reigning house? Is he in their pocket?, is the question he asks. He doesn’t have an answer to it, but he wants to know too.

Anne Brannen  33:10 

Because it might be that it didn’t happen that way, with the rugs and the writhing people, or it might be that it did happen, but that you just don’t mention it, because that doesn’t look so good.

Michelle Butler  33:24 

Yeah. Yeah. Moscati wants to know, is there a reason that Al Tabari is giving us … he can’t gloss over entirely. It’s a fact that’s out there, but he gives us the absolute bare minimum he can get away with and then moves on. Is there a reason for that? And he goes through other authors. But again, the most interesting one is that early, the earliest one, the ninth century. I found that fascinating because it is only 100 years afterwards. Usually these things develop over time, pieces get added in, but it’s there whole cloth. And I’m dying to know why? And there’s no answer. The world is interesting. Everything’s interesting, but not always people have written the book, damn it.

Anne Brannen  34:12 

We would like to really thank our beloved listener for sending us down this particular, which was an entire rabbit hole. Sometimes we go down rabbit holes because we’re trying to, you know, we just find stuff that are sidelines. But this entire thing was a rabbit hole. It was a giant rabbit hole.

Michelle Butler  34:27 

I sound kind of whiny, but I thoroughly enjoyed this research. I mean, I learned at least 17 things that I didn’t already know, which is great. This is why I’m here. I have no idea why the listeners are here. Thank you so much for staying with us, but why I am here is to learn things that I don’t already know.

Anne Brannen  34:45 

That is exactly what I’m doing, too. So it was fun. It really was. It was nice, because we do make little segues into the early modern period, but the fact we actually know the early modern period, and so, you know, we’re just learning a little stuff. But this was all going on at the same time. It’s very interesting stuff over in other pieces of the world, and things we did not know.

Michelle Butler  35:06 

I have to read some more about the Abbasids, because they are contemporaries–the early Abbasid caliphs are contemporaries of Charlemagne, and they have the same project. They are hiring scholars and getting stuff written down so it doesn’t get lost. I think that’s fascinating. I just think it’s fascinating. So this was fun. This was so much fun.

Anne Brannen  35:29 

I did. I had fun. Thank you.

Michelle Butler  35:31 

I’m super grateful that I did not have to struggle through the French.

Anne Brannen  35:36 

You are so welcome. You really are. It wasn’t difficult. I kept going on, and then I would have to, like, make dinner or something, or, I don’t know, take the dogs out and talk to my wife and whatnot. So I kept having to put it off. It took me longer than I thought it was going to. So I kept writing you, well, I’ll send it tomorrow, and then I’d send another one. No, really, the next day it is.

Michelle Butler  35:57 

It was blazing fast from my point of view, because it would have taken me six months.

Anne Brannen  36:03 

And that was me leaving out all the Arabic poetry. I just said, Okay, no, and I didn’t translate that because the Arabic poetry had been translated into French. But I thought, why don’t we just leave that, since he already told us what the pieces were that we thought were important.

Michelle Butler  36:17 

I did go look up that place where–this scholar, man, the expectations for scholarship in the 1950s were different.  Because there’s that section where he quotes Greek and just leaves it untranslated. I did go look that up.

Anne Brannen  36:31 

I know I didn’t. What did it say?

Michelle Butler  36:35 

It’s a Byzantine chronicler and it isn’t really relevant. It doesn’t really say anything different.

Anne Brannen  36:41 

I’m glad I didn’t try this. I can’t read Greek. And I’m like, Okay, I’m not doing this. So I just went on to the next paragraph.

Michelle Butler  36:48 

It’s a good thing to not have spent that much time on but, but just to recap, he’s an Italian, writing in French, translating from Arabic, and then just drops Greek in for the hell of it, because if he has to learn the language, you have to too.

Anne Brannen  37:04 

And we all should, shouldn’t we? But I didn’t. Oh, well. I am working on Ukrainian. I mean, it’s not like I’ve kept my boundaries closed. I’ve moved off into Slavic languages, but I haven’t done Greek.

Michelle Butler  37:15 

I do my little Duolingo every day, but Greek and French are not among what I’m studying on Duolingo.

Anne Brannen  37:22 

Well, that was fun. So what we come down with is that when the Umayyad caliphate was thrown over by the Abbasids, they got rid of the Umayyads and really pretty much killed most of them. That’s what happened. Were there rugs and writhing guests? Nah. You can’t eat dinner that way. This is ridiculous.

Michelle Butler  37:42 

I actually really love the fact, the totally nutty idea that one of them escapes to Spain and sets up a caliphate over there.

Anne Brannen  37:52 

Yep, that lasts for hundreds of years, that piece.

Michelle Butler  37:55 

When I first was looking at this, I was like, Well, that didn’t happen.

Anne Brannen  37:58 

That’s what I thought. That’s exactly what I thought. No way. No way this happened.

Michelle Butler  38:03 

No way.

Anne Brannen  38:06 

But it did. So that part did. No on the rugs over the bloody guests and then having dinner, yes on the some guy runs away and founds the caliphate of Cordova. Sure. Why not?

Michelle Butler  38:15 

Every once in a while, totally squirrely things happen.

Anne Brannen  38:19 

The next time that you all hear from us, we’re going to be going back into our, you know, kind of like regular 1000 years of a continent. We’re going to go to Prussia in the year 997, because Abalbert of Prague–Prague is where he’s from, Prussia is where he dies–Adalbert of Prague was murdered by a group of pagans who were annoyed by his missionary activity.

Michelle Butler  38:44 

Ooo, I don’t know anything about this. This will be fun.

Anne Brannen  38:46 

I know. I put this one on. This one was one of mine. Because that was in my, hey, we need to move east from our usual…we need to keep going east so we’re going to Prussia.

Michelle Butler  38:58 

Cool. This’ll be fun.

Anne Brannen  39:00 

I think it will. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. We can be found on places like Spotify and Apple and any of the places where the podcasts are hanging out. You can get a hold of us directly. We’re at our website, truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. There are links to the podcast, and there’s also links to the show notes, and to the transcriptions, which don’t go up as soon as the podcasts do, but they go up as soon as we can get them up. We have an index now, should you wish to find something you want to look for, or if you’ve been wondering what we’ve been doing. It’s hard to put together an index like this. But you know what? You can find things, and we’re on episode 101 so, you know, there’s only 100 episodes to go through. You can, just like skim through them pretty quick. Yeah, so that’s it. Bye.

Michelle Butler  39:52 

Bye.

103. Pino III Ordelaffi Poisons a Whole Lot of People, Forli, Northern Italy, 1463-1480

Anne Brannen  0:23 

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen, your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:33 

And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:36 

Today we want to talk about poison, because we’re going back to Italy. We’re going to Italy at the last half of the 15th century to talk about Pino the third Ordelaffi, who poisoned a bunch of people. We want to talk about him. So we’re in Northern Italy in the second half of the 15th century, in the province of Forli Cesna, a very prosperous region. Lots of art.  Lots. They had lots of money. Why I don’t know them better, I don’t know but there you go. I know them now. The Ordelaffis ruled Forli starting in the 13th century when Theobaldo Ordelaffi conquered the city. It was then a Ghibelline city, and in 1302 his son, who was Scarpetta Ordelaffi, went to war with Florence, with the Guelphs, the white Guelphs. So then it was going to be a Guelph city, on account of by that time, the Guelphs had split into the white Guelphs and the black Guelphs, and the white Guelphs were trying to take back power in Florence. Dante Alighieri was Scarpetta’s secretary, and so he was one of the leaders of the white Guelphs because he’d been exiled from Florence, haven’t he, you know, and you can’t write poetry all the time. Sometimes you have to go do some other stuff. So he was exiled from the city by the black Guelphs, and they didn’t take Florence back for Dante’s crew, though Scarpetta went on to take some other territory. He was succeeded by his brother, Francesco. This would be Francesco the first Ordelaffi. Francesco the second, his nephew, who succeeded him and actually lost a lot of the territory. Finally, he lost Forli itself. But Sinibaldo the first Ordelaffi got Forli back in 1376. This is basically the story. I’m just going to give you a precis of what’s going to happen. They get it, they lose it, they get it. They lose it. They get it. They lose it. Now I’ll go on and explain it in more scholarly forms. I mean as scholarly as I get on this podcast where I’m not actually being paid for it. So his nephew Pino the first Ordelaffi poisoned his cousin Giovanni, which was Sinibaldo’s son, and then he poisoned Sinibaldo himself. That way he could rule Forli. So the poisoning, this is sort of a theme. I believe Michelle has more to talk about that. Basically, we think it’s going to be one of the themes of our lives for a while. So that was in 1376, which is 100 years before our Pino the third was poisoning people. The Ordelaffi lost Forli again in 1425, and they got it back in 1433, then they got exiled in 1480 by the pope–that’s going to be Pope Sixtus the fourth–who gave Forli to his nephew, Girolamo Riario. So in 1433, the Ordelaffis had gotten Forli back because Antonio the first Ordelaffi had gotten it back after a popular revolt against the governor who had been installed by the papacy. Now he lost Forli again in 1436 to Francesco Zavoza, but he got Forli back three years later and his son, Francesco the fourth Ordelaffi succeeded him. In 1454 he ruled jointly with his brother, Pino the third Ordelaffi, our protagonist. So we are now back to where we started our primary story of the day, having established that the Ordelaffi family ruled Forli fairly often, off and on, from the 13th century until our story starts, his rule, first with his brother and then on his own. So at this point our protagonist–he can’t be our hero. He can’t even really be an anti hero, because if he’s an anti hero, you like something about him. At any rate, our protagonist is now ruling Forli with his brother–lucky brother–Pino the third has been ruling with his brother, Francesco, since 1454. Okay. In 1463 Pino the third got very ill. So everybody assumed that Francesco had poisoned him, which might be true, might not, but at any rate, Pino got better, and then three years later, in 1466, Francesco got ill and he died, probably having also been poisoned, in this case by Pino.. So Pino the third took over as the sole ruler of Forli. That same year, his wife–who was Barbara Manfredi. You really want to remember the name Manfredi because it’s going to come up a lot–Barbara Manfredi, his wife who was from Faenza, about to 12.5 miles away, she died very suddenly, and her father, Astorre the second Manfredi, accused Pino of poisoning her because Barbara apparently had been seeing too much of the Podesto of Florence, Giovanni Orsheoli, alas, but he had him killed as well. So he poisoned Barbara, and he had her apparent lover killed. But the father’s real upset. Pino built a really, really big sepulcher for her, this beautiful tomb thing, which you can still see in the abbey of San Mercurialis in Forli, and this will come up later. So remember that I told you that this exists. So Barbara’s father tried to take over Forli and oust Pino, and the Pope was helping. Yeah. So Pino made an alliance with Astorre’s nephew, Tadeo Manfredi. Of course, he’s Barbara’s cousin. So he made an alliance with Barbara’s cousin Tadeo, and also he married Tadeo’s daughter, Zaffira, which would be Barbara’s cousin once removed. Now, Pino’s mother was Katarina Rangoni, and Pino poisoned her too, because, we gather, she knew too much about his having murdered his brother. Also he tried to poison Elisabetta Manfredi, which was his brother’s wife, who was also his wife’s sister, thereby being his sister in law two different ways. But she got away. She and her children were imprisoned but they got away, and she went back to Faenza. She died two months later, but she wasn’t poisoned by Pino the third, just saying. Okay, so that’s 1467. At this point, 1467, he’s murdered his brother, his mother, his wife, and attempted to murder his wife’s sister, who was also his brother’s wife. And he’s married to Zaffira Manfredi in 1473. Now, she was a cousin of Barbara’s and everybody else, but she married him anyway. Why? I do not know. I tried to look this up. I’m like, Why did Zaffira say, Hey, this is a good idea? But sshe died. She died three years later, having gotten poisoned by Pino, maybe because she was taking drugs to counter infertility, and maybe somebody didn’t like her. Maybe he just killed her. I really wanted to find out what this was. Couldn’t pin anything down for this, but at any rate, she was dead, and everybody believes that Pino poisoned her. I mean, of course, why not? Also that year he poisoned Gaspare Stambazzi’s dinner because he had been boasting about how much influence he had over Pino. So he’s just kind of a sideline. People don’t even really mention him, but he’s dead too. He married his third wife, Lucrezia della Mirandola in 1475. We’re all having a little moment where we’re asking ourselves, why, why? But she was very careful about what she ate. So it’s like, you know, ladies that married Henry the Eighth after he’d proven that he was really a kind of dangerous husband. You only did it if you thought there was maybe a way you could keep your head on your shoulders. She was very careful about what she ate, we are told. And indeed, she outlived him, mostly on account of poisoning him herself at a dinner which was being held five years later in 1480. So what happened then? We need to know what happened after all this. You got a bunch of dead, poisoned people and some that had just been killed. Okay. Lucrezia became the regent of Forli because her son, the young Sinibaldo the second, was three or something, so she’s the regent, and some of the remaining Ordelaffi besieged the city because they wanted to rule it themselves, but the papal troops saved the day. Although young Sinibaldo died the same day that the papal troops came by and saved everybody. But anyway, they’re dead, so the Ordelaffis no longer have control over Forli, though, really at the end, they weren’t having that much control anyway. So the Pope’s nephew took over, and that was Girolamo Riario, who was married to Catarina Sforza. Hostilities and disorders started in Rome when the Pope died. Girolamo had many enemies. He’d made a lot of enemies. Catarina wanted to fight. They were still in Rome. But her husband wanted to give up and leave Rome, and he took up against her, so she had to take her children to Forli, where her uncle had been keeping the city from falling into the uprising and disorder that were going on across Italy. But in 1485 tax increases led to another rebellion, and Girolamo got assassinated, and Caterina and her children were incarcerated and Caterina said something really dramatic from the walls of the fortress. So the rebellion failed, and Caterina got the city back. Now, what she said comes down in history as…well, comes down in historical story, as: they said, We’re going to kill all your children if you don’t give up. And she lifts up her skirt and she shows her genitalia, and she says, kill them all. I can make more with this. That would be very dramatic. It’s a great story, but probably she just said, I’m pregnant. Anyways, Caterina Sforza. We love her. For a while, we love her–things fall apart. She was improbably, completely improbably, because who’s a successful regent for little baby rulers, especially when they’re women? It’s really hard to do. But for 12 years, she was a successful regent. She avenged her husband’s death. She imprisoned anybody who had been associated with or it was related to, anybody associated with a conspiracy. She governed well. She exchanged gifts with neighboring rulers. She arranged marriages, she decreased taxes, she trained the militia. She tried to remain neutral in a conflict between the Duchy of Milan and the Kingdom of Naples. She finally ended up being allied with the Neapolitans, but they betrayed her as far as she was concerned. So she remained neutral after that, and she was doing really well. Then one day, she fell in love. This was with Giacomo Feo, who was really not worthy of her. He had no education, he had no title, but she married him, and everybody was upset. And he behaved really badly. He was cruel. He was insolent. He slapped her son, Ottaviano, who was the actual ruler of Forli. She was being the regent for him. So there were a bunch of conspiracies, several conspiracies, one after another of people trying to oust her and give Ottaviano the power. One of those conspiracies managed to succeed in killing Giacomo and Caterina was horribly and hideously vengeful to the conspirators and their families. She killed people essentially by torturing them. She slaughtered women and children and babies and pregnant wives.

Michelle Butler  12:03 

Wow.

Anne Brannen  12:04 

Then she fell in love again and she remarried. Oh, yay. So in 1488–this is eight years after the death of Pino that we’re talking about. Only eight years have gone by. The Ordelaffis had lost Forli. Caterina Sforza would lose it to the Visconti of Milan. The Visconti would later lose it to the Borgias, and when they move out, the pope will hold it, with the exception of one year where the Ordelaffis come back–in 1503 to 1504, they’re in for a little bit, then they’re gone again, and that’s it. So Pino the third Ordelaffi, he’s like this one lifetime in a series of hundreds of years of conflict and instability, and the Ordelaffis going in and out and in and out and in and out of power in this area of prosperity and art, but he’s remarkable for his personal death toll is what’s going on. Michelle and I think there really should be a lot more written about it than we could find. There’s stuff in Italian, but there’s very little in English. So poison. The poison. Here’s the poison. We need to discuss the poison, because if you’re anything like me, at some point you were saying, What poison are they using? What? What are they doing? What is this? And so you have to go find this out. The answer is probably, probably, the poison was the king of poisons, which is arsenic, which was known since the fifth century BCE, and the Arabic chemist Javier Ibn Hayyan in the eighth century had made arsenic trioxide, which is a form of arsenic that is odorless, tasteless, and colorless, so that your victim doesn’t detect it, and also could be used in the forms of powder, solution, or gas, making it easy to administer in some way, assuming that you can get to their food or, I suppose, if it’s a gas, you just kind of blow it on their faces while they’re sleeping. Now, we know the symptoms of arsenic poisoning, but we didn’t know them until the 1700s. So until the victim died, it just looked like the victim was ill, basically with food poisoning or something like that. That was it. It was not detectable. However, however, there are a great many more poisons available at the time. I want to tell you some of the best known, just briefly. Digitalis, which comes from foxglove. We discussed it in our very first podcast, because Congrande della Scala went down from digitalis. Or wolfsbane, which is monkshood, aconite, which is often used to poison wells in war. Or hemlock, which, as we all know, was fed to Socrates to kill him off. Or belladonna, which is deadly nightshade. Or poisonous mushrooms, especially Amanita muscaria–fly agaric. Or dead bodies, because they were known to be poisonous, so you could put them in wells, or you could catapult them into a besieged city. People didn’t know why they were poisonous, but they knew they were, so you could use them. Lots of possibilities. Maybe Pino had one favorite poison. Maybe he needed several. We actually do not know exactly what he was using. Arsenic, probably, but we don’t know for sure. And maybe he didn’t do all those poisonings at all, but the chroniclers say he did, and everybody believed so. I have one more piece of information that I want to give you though. In World War II, Barbara’s tomb was damaged by German bombing, and in fixing it back up, they exhumed her corpse, and they examined that, and there was no sign of poison.

Michelle Butler  12:14 

Really?!

Anne Brannen  12:16 

Really.

Michelle Butler  12:36 

Wow. That’s fascinating.

Anne Brannen  14:56 

Isn’t that lovely? So we don’t know what he did. We don’t know.

Michelle Butler  15:07 

Huh.

Anne Brannen  15:08 

The chroniclers believed he had poisoned like, I don’t know, basically everybody he saw. So that’s his reputation. But I don’t know what the reality is, and if Barbara was poisoned, it wasn’t with arsenic, because arsenic would have shown up.

Michelle Butler  15:44 

That’s fascinating. I mean, that actually dovetails really well with some of the stuff that I was researching, because it’s very difficult to know whether somebody’s poisoned, so the legal stuff is trying to grapple with that.

Anne Brannen  16:00 

Yeah, because a lot of times, people were ill. You know, were obviously ill, but it turned out they’d been poisoned. And a lot of times people thought people had been poisoned, but they actually were just ill. We know better now, although not always. I listen to true crime stuff, and quite often we don’t really know for quite some time what has happened, if we ever find out at all. The line is not clear.

Michelle Butler  16:23 

Wow. Fascinating.

Anne Brannen  16:25 

I was very happy to find that little bit about Barbara.

Michelle Butler  16:35 

So that’s interesting, because I could kind of see where having a reputation as somebody who is willing to poison you if you cross them is useful, you know, as kind of pre-intimidation. But there’s a danger there as well, because you can irritate people to the point where they feel like they have to take action against you. So that’s really interesting.

Anne Brannen  17:03 

Or poison you at dinner, you know, before you poison their dinner.

Michelle Butler  17:07 

Exactly. Wow.

Anne Brannen  17:10 

Because it’s not clear at all why he killed his second wife. There’s some assumptions about why he killed the first one, but the second one is like, well, maybe this, maybe that, maybe another thing, yeah, maybe, maybe. She’s dead–gathered he poisoned her. Why? We don’t know. Fascinating. Well, what did you find?

Michelle Butler  17:29 

So what I have–because I also found nothing in terms of these guys in particular–what I found is a book called Murder in Renaissance Italy.

Anne Brannen  17:42 

Oh that sounds like, you know, a foundational text for us.

Michelle Butler  17:45 

It seems like it’s gonna be useful. It’s from 2017, so it’s fairly new. It’s edited by Trevor Dean, who also has a standalone book about Renaissance Italy and crime–Crime in Renaissance Italy. So I’m looking at that as well. In this edited book, there’s a chapter called “Poison and poisoning in Renaissance Italy” by Alessandro Pastore, and this chapter examines poisoning from a legal and judicial perspective. He asserts that murder by poison is important to consider because the laws treated it differently. It’s treated differently than other kinds of murder because there is deceit, planning, and secrecy involved with it, and you are not really able to defend yourself.

Anne Brannen  18:49 

Ooh, that’s interesting.

Michelle Butler  18:51 

That concept that poisoning is a worse crime because it’s a type of betrayal–you have to get close enough to somebody to be able to do this–and you can’t detect it, so there’s no chance for defense: That’s an inheritance from Roman law. Which makes sense that there would be Roman laws hanging around that get inherited. He also wants to examine gender and class assumptions which are attached to poisoning in Renaissance Italy, specifically that the upper class, that it’s an elite crime and that it’s a woman’s crime.

Anne Brannen  19:28 

The arsenic was available to people that weren’t elite. And also all those herbs, you know, the belladonna, the foxglove, you really can go find.

Michelle Butler  19:37 

Oh, I agree with you. And so does he actually,

Anne Brannen  19:40 

Oh, yay, yay.

Michelle Butler  19:42 

That is the stereotype, that Renaissance Italy is just chockfull of elite people trying to get a leg up in politics by poisoning each other.

Anne Brannen  19:53 

Well. To be fair, I think it is. Only, I think there’s a lot of poorer people doing it too. Just, you know, to get rid of others.

Michelle Butler  19:59 

Yeah. He has two central questions: how or did authorities attempt to control the sale or access to substances you can poison people with?, which I think is an interesting question, because I would not have assumed that anybody was trying to. Because you can get a hold of…you’ve got the plants. So that was an interesting question, but the answer really is, they’re not actually trying to control sale or access.  What they’re doing is punishing people afterwards. If you were the supplier of the toxic substance, you will be in trouble. So it’s an after the fact situation. It’s after the fact punishment, rather than trying to regulate who can get in control of things. He examines how authorities punished poisoners. This is also really interesting. By the 16th century, you have the dawn of forensics. Records of trials are showing authorities wanting proof of poisoning, and they’re beginning to use animals. They’re doing more examination of the body to see if they can ascertain whether they were actually poisoned, whether there’s damage in the body that would come from poison. And they’re using animals to test. Oh, we think this food was poisoned. Well, let’s feed it to a dog and see what happens. So the inheritance from Roman law says that harsher punishment is warranted for poisoning

Anne Brannen  21:25 

Because of the intimacy.

Michelle Butler  21:26 

Yes.

Anne Brannen  21:27 

Okay.

Michelle Butler  21:28 

It’s a death penalty crime. A lot of his data comes from Bologna. There are statutes from Bologna in 1454 that prescribe the death penalty in the form of decapitation, both for the poisoner and the supplier of the lethal dose of poison. There is pretty severe punishment even if the person doesn’t die. What is prescribed is both hands amputated and the face branded if the person survives–

Anne Brannen  21:28 

Wow.

Michelle Butler  21:28 

–the attempt. One thing that I thought was really fascinating, that I would have liked him to talk about more, is that this statute is significantly harsher than one from 100 years earlier, which stipulated a fine for attempted poisoning.

Anne Brannen  22:14 

And tell me the the year of this statute.

Michelle Butler  22:18 

1454, and we’re in Bologna,

Anne Brannen  22:22 

It’s become a much bigger deal than it was. Okay.

Michelle Butler  22:26 

Then the 16th century law goes even farther. All assets of a poisoner are forfeit and the poisoner is executed. So it’s ratcheted up now to not just the execution, but all of your assets are forfeit, and if you killed a parent with poison, you are executed, not by decapitation, but by hanging, and you are left there to rot.

Anne Brannen  22:51 

Meaning your parent.

Michelle Butler  22:52 

Your parent. I really would have liked him to talk about this a little bit more, but this wasn’t his point, so he didn’t, but I would have been really interested in knowing what we know about that clear progression over the course of 200 years.

Anne Brannen  23:05 

Yeah. What has gotten worse and how?

Michelle Butler  23:09 

There are some city statutes, like in Corsica, where trying to give somebody a love potion is treated as poisoning. Those are the same category of crime.

Anne Brannen  23:20 

Huh.

Michelle Butler  23:21 

Sometimes, if you are attempting to give somebody medicine and you have messed something up, and it has become toxic, that can also be treated as a poison.

Anne Brannen  23:31 

So that puts doctors at real ris

Michelle Butler  23:35 

Yes, but judges have the ability to show leniency in the cases of love potions. The line between magic and poison was non-existent, and this is also an inheritance from the Romans. If the person doesn’t die, in the case of a love potion, or in the case of case of a drug that has gone wrong, a medicine that has gone wrong, they’re allowed to show some leniency, but not if the victim dies. Well, there’s arguments in the 15th century between jurists, between law professors and between prosecutors in different places. Some people are arguing for the death penalty even in cases where the victim does not die. Some are saying, well, you know, we’re happy with the mutilation punishment. But again, this is a thing you can see changing over time as we get further into Renaissance Italy. So late 15th, early 16th century, you have more of that, more and more of them leaning towards the harsher punishment, which I think is interesting. He does address this concept, or this kind of stereotype. Let me give you the quote: “According to a traditional and long accepted view, the political framework created by the end of the balance among the Italian states in the late 15th century and the involvement of France and the Holy Roman Empire in the Italian Wars was the ideal breeding ground for a web of plots and conspiracies in which poisons seem to play a crucial role. Traditionally, this has been the idea among historians that there was something particularly special about the chaos of Italy in the late 15th century that leads to a rash of poisoning.” He does not think this is as true as we tend to think,  that all of a sudden, the de Medicis show up on the scene and everybody’s trying to poison each other, partially because you have Franck Collard’s 2007 The Crime of Poison in the Middle Ages that cites 400 cases of poisoning in the political sphere. So Collard argues that it’s more of a continuity, that poison really has been a political tool forever, for quite some time. The author of this chapter also agrees with that, and again, I would have liked him to expand on this just a tad more, but he doesn’t. It does seem that from the change in the laws, there is a perception that more is happening and it needs to be dealt with legally, even if there isn’t really more happening.

Anne Brannen  26:07 

Right. Theoretically, people make laws because they’re trying to stop stuff that is happening or make stuff happen, but sometimes it’s just an idea and things are not really happening at all.

Michelle Butler  26:19 

Yes. And we have seen this before. The late 15th century —

Anne Brannen  26:26 

Droit de seigneur.

Michelle Butler  26:27 

Exactly it. In Spain, we saw those laws about droit de seigneur, which never really existed, but there’s all this anxiety that it did and so they’re making laws outlawing it. It makes life difficult for historians, because just because there’s a law against something doesn’t mean it ever actually happened.

Anne Brannen  26:43 

It’s weird.

Michelle Butler  26:44 

And most of the evidence he examines is from Bologna. So with the caveat that a different chapter in this same exact book argues that, the stereotype that men stab and women poison holds true for Bologna, this author says the exact opposite. So, yay. I love scholarly debate. He says that, no, actually, the evidence is that men poisoned at least as much, if not more, than women. What he’s doing is he’s looking at the records of executions, and he also finds that the executions for poisoning only accounts for 1% of them in late 15th century and early 16th century Bologna, so it’s not as common as other kinds of crimes. He, of course, also finds that merchants and working classes had access to toxic substances and used them, so many of the people who are executed as poisoners…they’re not all elite people. So he sees it as being across social classes. That it’s uncommon, but when it does happen, it happens across social classes, and it’s not a speciality of women. He does, of course, talk about the early forensics, which I was just fascinated by.

Anne Brannen  27:58 

We have discussed an early forensic method, which was parading murderers around next to corpses, because then the corpses do something if the murderer comes by, what is that?

Michelle Butler  28:11 

That would be like, fake early forensics. Yeah, cruentation is that idea that the bodies will bleed–

Anne Brannen  28:17 

Oh, that’s right. The bodies bleed.

Michelle Butler  28:17 

–in the presence of their murderer.

Anne Brannen  28:22 

And that has not been shown to be true?

Michelle Butler  28:24 

Yeah. There is no physical evidence for that belief, but these guys do. Maybe it’s just because there’s so many rumors of poisoning floating around, but they’re finally, like, we got to have some actual evidence. Also, as you’re moving into the early 16th century, there’s less resistance to the idea of an autopsy, looking at the body. And–so this is gross, my apologies in advance, but sometimes what they do is they take what was in the person’s stomach and give it to an animal to see what happens to them.

Anne Brannen  29:00 

So they don’t need the food that someone was fed. They don’t need that at all. They just need whatever is left. Okay, that actually makes sense. I mean, I’m glad that we don’t have to do that now, but as a method that seems reasonable.

Michelle Butler  29:15 

It is surprisingly hard evidence. We want some hard evidence.

Anne Brannen  29:18 

Yes, this was poison, as we now know.

Michelle Butler  29:22 

Yhey used domestic animals for testing–chickens, dogs, pigeons, cats, pigs, basically animals that were considered expendable. Nobody’s using a war horse or a cow or something really expensive.

Anne Brannen  29:36 

Oh right, no, you wouldn’t do that.

Michelle Butler  29:38 

But this was real evidence. By the early 16th century, you were allowed to introduce the results of these experiments in criminal trials.

Anne Brannen  29:53 

Wow.

Michelle Butler  29:54 

And we know that they were used criminal trials. It’s not just that the law says you can, it’s that there are records of trials in which these experiments were used. So now I want to go read about the history of forensics.

Anne Brannen  30:10 

Of course. You’ll probably find some more cases for us to put on our list.

Michelle Butler  30:14 

Oh my gosh. This was a fascinating chapter. He wants to question assessments of poisoning as a predominantly female crime. One of his conclusions is, “there is the need to question traditional assessments of poisoning as a predominantly female crime, planned and carried out in the courts of princes and cardinals.” Actually we have lots of evidence of other people doing that too. And this–I thought was kind of fascinating as well’–“Finally, the crime of poisoning leads us to make a connection between the question of murder and the recent historiography of emotions. While some forms of murder appear to be the result of anger or ritual righteous indignation, as in the case of uxoracides committed to avenge honor soiled by a wife’s adultery, poisoning seems to be caused by other, more hidden and sometimes deep rooted feelings. In this way, criminal behavior is no longer simply seen as the result of an impulse triggered by passions, but as the consequence of resentment, rancor and thought out covert planning.” Now, I thought that was interesting, because I have skepticism about the assertions that, because we now have the words–so the word ’emotions’ and the word ‘feelings,’ these are words come into Romance languages. They’re not in Middle English, they’re not in middle Italian. They’re words that show up with the Renaissance. But I have skepticism about the idea that people did not have those emotions.

Anne Brannen  30:59 

Right. That doesn’t make any sense. They even had words for them, just not the ones we’re using.

Michelle Butler  32:04 

Yes. In Anglo Saxon, we didn’t have the word ‘orange,’ but we had the color orange, and it was called ‘red-yellow.’

Anne Brannen  32:11 

Yeah, which is kind of what orange is.

Michelle Butler  32:15 

I have some skepticism, but I thought it was interesting that he made that move,from a scholarly point of view, that this is one of the things to think about with poisoning, that maybe the Romans were actually on to something here–that it is a different kind of crime, and it may be coming from a different set of emotions, which makes some sense. You know, that the kind of anger that we see where Robert the Bruce gets mad at Comyn and stabs him in the church is a different sort of thing then ‘and now I’m going to invite everybody over for supper.’ Not just have a blood feast, because people did that. We’ve seen a lot of that–shut the doors and kill everybody. But poison them, which does involve quite a lot more planning than just lock the doors and kill everybody.

Anne Brannen  33:04 

Right, right. Yeah. You gotta get the poison, put it in the food, make sure they get the food, whoever it is you’re trying to kill, which is really different from having somebody have a sword and then on a signal, Whack, whack.

Michelle Butler  33:17 

Honestly, lock the doors and kill everybody is pretty straightforward, and there’s a lot fewer things to go wrong than poisoning things and make sure the right people will eat it, and they have to eat enough of it. So that was interesting. I think what I learned during this one is some more sources to go read for other things. Not just the murder in Renaissance Italy, but, of course, the Crime of Poison in the Middle Ages, which I’m very excited about acquiring, and it might possibly be on its way to me even as we speak. And I truly, truly shocked that somebody who is accused of poisoning this many people can’t get some scholarly attention. What does a guy have to do to be famous after his death?

Anne Brannen  34:08 

Just too many. Yeah, I don’t know.

Michelle Butler  34:11 

Now that I think about it, you know, we have so many mass shootings in the US that it’s at this point, if it’s only four or five, it barely makes a headline. I mean, you really got to get into double digits before it becomes a breaking news situation.

Anne Brannen  34:26 

Well, thank you. I like hearing about the poison in the law, and I enjoyed learning about this lovely family that went in and out. Oh, goodness me. I believe we’re done with that.

Michelle Butler  34:45 

I found a little bit about the family, and I enjoyed reading about them, because they are kind of bad news from start to finish.

Anne Brannen  34:53 

Not very good at governing and keeping a city. No. They don’t end up with, like, long stretches of the family getting to keep things.

Michelle Butler  35:03 

It’s not like he’s the black sheep. They all do questionable, sketchy things.

Anne Brannen  35:08 

He’s just the one with the most number of hits. The next time people hear from us, we are going to be in Iraq at Kufa in the year 750, so it’s going to be one of those special editions where we’re in the right time period, but off of the continent that we’re usually in on. Because al Saffah gave amnesty to the Umayyad dynasty and held a feast at which everybody got killed. We got a blood feast.

Michelle Butler  35:40 

Oh, yay, yay.

Anne Brannen  35:43 

A real blood feast, as opposed to just poisoning them. You know, blood’s involved. So there’s that.

Michelle Butler  35:47 

We haven’t had a blood feast for a while.

Anne Brannen  35:49 

No, we haven’t. This was suggested to us by Jacob Glennifler, one of our listeners, thank you.

Michelle Butler  35:57 

That’s exciting.

Anne Brannen  35:58 

Because we weren’t gonna find it. For sure. We were gonna get stuck someplace else.

Michelle Butler  36:03 

The likelihood is that there will be more sources for that than there was for this.

Anne Brannen  36:09 

Probably, yes, because it’s a sort of major thing in history of the area.

Michelle Butler  36:16 

Now I know if I put a Italian Renaissance poisoner on the list, go check and see if there’s a book or two.

Anne Brannen  36:23 

Well, we thought there would be, didn’t we.

Michelle Butler  36:24 

Don’t make assumptions.

Anne Brannen  36:26 

We do. We make assumptions about things all the time. Oh, there’ll be a lot of this, or this would be pretty easy. Because, you know, there’s been other things where we said, oh, okay, we’ll just talk about this, must be a short amount of time. And then it turned out we were talking about the entire history of slavery.

Michelle Butler  36:40 

Yeah, that was another one. I put that one on the list too. Perhaps I had better do more research before I put things on the list.

Anne Brannen  36:50 

I don’t know, though, if you would have caught that though. Crimea. Let’s talk about Crimea. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. We can be found on Apple podcast and Spotify and any place where the podcasts are hanging out. We ourselves are over at truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. There you can find links to the podcast and links to show notes and transcriptions. We get them up as soon as we can. There’s just two of us doing this, and we don’t get paid for it. We’re just doing it as we do it. There’s also an index now, so you can actually find things. If you want to say to yourselves, Gee, I wonder if True Crime Medieval has ever talked about the White Ship disaster, you can look it up and find out that, yes, we have and mentioned it several times, actually, as it happens, because I love it so much. But you can look things up and see if they’re in there. Then you can leave commentary. We’d love to hear about medieval crimes that you know about. If we haven’t put them on the list, then we do. I hadn’t realized the Defenestration of Prague had been given to us also by a listener. Jessica.

Michelle Butler  38:00 

I had forgotten that too, but yes.

Anne Brannen  38:02 

Thank you, Jessica. Oh, yeah, so that’s us. We’ll see you next time. Bye.

Michelle Butler  38:10 

Bye.

102. William de Burgh Starves his Cousin Walter to Death, Greencastle, Ulster 1332

Anne Brannen  0:23 

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen and I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:34 

And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:37 

Today on True Crime Medieval, we are talking about June of 1333, when he was 20 years old–he was only 20 years old, he’s so young–William Donn de Berg, the third Earl of Ulster, was killed in Carrickfergus by getting stabbed by his bodyguards because his bodyguards had been subverted and encouraged in doing this by the husband of one of William’s cousins–Gill was her name–because the year before that, he had starved the brother of that cousin, who was also, of course, his cousin–that would be Walter–he had starved Walter to death. Then there was a civil war after that, because it was really, really bad behavior. So how did we get here? The de Berg family in Ireland was founded by a another William de Berg of a different generation, who lived in the last half of the 12th century and had gone to Ireland, not in the earliest wave of the Norman invasion of Ireland, but with John, who was the Lord of Ireland and would later become King John, in 1185. He was born in Norfolk to an Anglo-Norman family, which was so minor that we can’t actually establish how they connected back to Normandy or their connection to the Norman invasion. But there was a genealogy that was invented, like, in the middle of the 19th century, that theoretically proved that they were descended from William the Conqueror and Charlemagne. The idea here was that William Fitz Adam was the same thing as William de Berg, but it was all made up. So we ignore that. But the William de Berg, who founded the Irish de Bergs, was from Norfolk, where his ancestors had lived for a while, however long that was. He got to Ireland with the future King John, and he was given vast lands by Henry the second, the King of England, who was John’s dad, but then John’s expedition to Ireland went very badly. I believe we talked about this in another podcast. It went really, really bad. It went bad because of John’s rudeness and just inherent being annoying and not treating the Irish well. He was just so conceited. De Berg was one of the royal administrators who was left there to take care of things in Ireland, which means attempting to keep the Irish in line and also keep the Normans in line. So that’s what William de Berg’s doing. From de Berg, the family held a whole lot of land in Connacht–they were the lords of Connacht, and they were also the Earls of Ulster. Now, the William de Berg, who had been granted Connacht, never actually claimed it. I mean, it was his, but he wasn’t there. In 1224, Richard Moore, his son, claimed it as the Lord of Connacht, and his son Walter took the title Lord of Connacht, and his son Richard Og took the title Lord of Connacht, and when he died in 1326, our William Donn, who was his grandson, took the title. And Walter Liath and Edmund Albanach–Walter’s the one who’s going to get actually starved to death in the castle–they were brothers, and they were sons of Richard Og. So they were sons of Richard Og, and William’s dad was a son of Richard Og, but William has inherited the title because his dad was older than Walter and Edmund. This is all so complex, but if you have a whole bunch of land and you want to establish a legacy, you have to make a lot of rules about who gets it and why–if you’re looking at the Normans, what you’re looking at is men, and when they were born. It has to go in order. It’s very, very orderly and so boring. All right. So William, at that time when his dad died, he was only 20, as you remember, but he was not only the third Earl of Ulster and the fourth Baron of Connacht, he was also the Justiciar of Ireland. By that time, the lines of the de Bergs that descended from that original de Berg, who was from Norfolk, who went to Ireland with rude future King John, they were in an area where the Norman colony had been shrinking since about 1300. They’d been battling with the Irish. The Normans had been leaving the countryside for the towns. King Edward the third was spending all his money on his forces, on fighting Scotland and France, instead of sending stuff to support the Anglo Normans in Ireland. There had been the Bruce invasions, so the Normans had to fight the Scots, and not just the Irish. They had to fight other Celts altogether. The Irish had been learning new strategies and taking back land and winning battles. It was just not a good time for the Normans. So when Richard de Berg died– this is Richard Og–and Ulster went to his grandson William Donn de Berg, of our title, William was only 14 at that point. Things really, really fell apart. William Donn had no experience in ruling or administering territories, and he’s the Justiciar of Ireland. You would really like to know how to administer things. He didn’t have enough support from England. He didn’t have enough men to hold the territory, and he and his relatives were at odds constantly. His cousin Walter tried to take Connacht and was defeated. William locked him up, along with his two brothers, and allowed him to starve to death. The brothers survived, but that’s why his cousin Gill, Walter’s sister, got her husband to capture William and get him stabbed by his retainers. At that point, then, there was only one heir to young William, who was his two year old daughter, Elizabeth. Her mother, who was Matilda of Lancaster, took her to England, and neither of them ever came back. So they’re over in England. There was no clear Earl of Connacht and three branches of the de Berg family. The people that are surviving are going to fight over Connacht. Now we have our civil war. This is called the Burke Civil War. It lasted three years. It did not end well. The three factions were led by Edmund Albanach de Berg, who was Walter and Gill’s brother; Edmund de Berg of Castle Connell, who was our young William’s uncle, the son of Richard Og; and whole nother guy altogether, haven’t mentioned him before: Uilleag de Berg, who was from south Connacht, who was the head of a branch of the family whose descent from the original William de Berg of Norfolk and then Ireland, has been highly contested. The earlier view was that this was an illegitimate branch of the family. You can see that reprinted in John O’Hara’s Irish pedigrees. Michelle, do you know about John O’Hara’s Irish pedigrees?

Michelle Butler  7:52 

No, I don’t.

Anne Brannen  7:53 

Well, don’t go and buy it. John O’Hara’s Irish pedigrees is this great tome that gives you an enormous amount of information. If you ever are messing with genealogy, you will see it quoted over and over and over. Here’s the problem. John O’Hara doesn’t give any sources, and he doesn’t tell you where he found information. He also made some things up. But he believed this, and he wrote it down. So ignore that. By 1911, we knew that this particular line was impossible, because some of the links wouldn’t work, because people had died before the children they were supposed to have had could even have been conceived. The next version advanced had Uilleag as a brother of Edmund Albanach and Walter’s. So you know,  brothers fighting brothers. But the latest version gives Uilleag as their nephew. At any rate, he’s a de Berg. He’s in South Connacht. He’s related somehow. He’s South Connacht, which is also, you know, like East Galway. All right, none of these three men had any kind of substantial military force. They had small armies. So the Civil War battles are small battles. At one point, Edmund de Berg of Castle Connell–our William Donn, you know, the one who got stabbed? It’s his uncle. He was killed in Loch Mask by Edmund Albanach. You remember, he’s the brother of Walter de Berg, and so his sons took over his section of Connacht, not really well. Finally, later that year, that’s going to be in 1338, things just sort of stopped, because really, nobody had the resources to keep going. It’s like, the stupidest civil war ending ever. Are there little, you know, treaties, or…? Nah it just kind of winds on down after a bunch of dead people. So Connacht got split up into the three branches, everybody got a piece, and they all became self governed and more and more detached from England, and the de Bergs got new names.

Michelle Butler  9:59 

That family just basically collapses.

Anne Brannen  10:02 

Totally collapses. They’re not even de Bergs anymore. They’re not working for England, and they have new names. They started using the name Burke, which is why we say the Burke Civil War. The branch of William Donn became the Burkes of Clan William, the branch of Walter became Mac William Iochtar– the lower McWilliams–and the branch of Uilleag, whoever the hell he was, became Clamricarde. Ulster, meanwhile–oh yeah, because we forgot about Ulster, because we’ve been talking about Connacht–but these are the Earls of Ulster. You know, we might have forgotten about them, but there they are. You remember baby Elizabeth. She’s off in England with her mom. She’s going to grow up, isn’t she, and she’s going to marry Lionel, the first Duke of Clarence, and so he becomes the Earl of Ulster. He’s over in England, but he comes back. Edward the third, his father, also made him the royal lieutenant of Ireland. So Lionel had to go and spend a bunch of time in Ireland trying to make it behave. Was he working in Connacht and Ulster? No, he wasn’t. He was in Dublin and Drogheda. At any rate, from then on, the Earls of Ulster are all English. They’re all just stuck in England. And what with one thing and another, the Irish pretty much took all of Ulster back and destroyed the Earldom of Ulster. It was a title, but the O’Neills actually had the land again. By the way, most of Connacht was taken back by Turleigh O’Connor. So the the Burke branches didn’t even keep Connacht. The Anglo Normans ended up being pushed back to the pale. So we say ‘beyond the pale.’ The word pale comes from the Latin word Palus, meaning staves, you know, meaning the kind of pointed staves that you might put around an area in order to keep horses from coming in at you. It’s the line, it’s the boundary. So beyond the pale means the place where all the outlaws live, who don’t even actually have any kind of good behavior and probably eat weird things and are not like us. If you’re in the pale, then you’re the right people, and if you’re beyond the pale, then you’re not. What’s beyond the pale here are the Irish. So I personally am in favor of being beyond the pale in many aspects of my life, actually. So the Normans have been pushed back to Dublin and pieces of Meath, Kildare, and Wicklow, and that’s it. Beyond that the earldoms just simply…they aren’t very useful. The Earls, if they are in Ireland, marry into the Irish, and they start using Irish customs. The Irish themselves continue to be really hostile. After that, you remember, there’s this thing called the Black Death. There had been the Great Famine before all this. Then there’s all this stupidity. Then there’s the Black Death. It’s just not a good time. You know, there’s all these people dying all around, different things. You either get starved to death, you die in war, or there’s a famine, and the English are not able to hold Ireland for, what, about 300 years, Michelle?

Michelle Butler  13:15 

Yeah, the Tudors start to make a effort to retake Ireland.

Anne Brannen  13:20 

And when they do, when the Tudors start making an effort to retake Ireland, it’s Ulster that’s the most problematic, because that’s the place that the Normans had really, really, really lost control of, for which they’re all grateful, I’m sure, to the de Bergs. That’s why it’s in Ulster that the Tudors institute the Ulster plantation, which is taking the land away from the Irish. You have to have, you know, weapons and stuff to do this. There’s some more bloodshed, but essentially, they took the land away from the Irish that owned it, and either sold it at really, really, really low rates, or handed it over to people that they believed they could trust to come in and not be Irish, which were in large part the people from Scotland who were being annoying. This would be like, for instance, some of my ancestors, the Elliots. They were a very badly behaved border clan–if you’re a border clan, you’re definitely outside some kind of pale–and that’s why a bunch of the Elliots ended up in Northern Ireland. So that’s where the Scots-Irish come from. The Scots-Irish are the people who are descended from the Scots that were brought over by the English and given land in Northern Ireland. By the time my Elliots came to America, which would have been like 300 years later than that, they were still calling themselves Scottish. They did not call themselves Irish, and they had been living in Ireland for a couple hundred years at least. Ulster was the most Irish of the Irish provinces and the most difficult for the English to hold, and it’s really because of the de Bergs. The de Bergs just kind of fell apart and handed it on over, and then the O’Neills and the O’Connells got to come back in.

Michelle Butler  15:20 

I really gost more from this crime than I was expecting. I put it on the list because the original one with Walter is another example of throwing somebody in a room and just leaving them to die.

Anne Brannen  15:40 

It’s like, why? As you said before we started talking about this, why didn’t you just kill them? Why didn’t he just kill his cousin?

Michelle Butler  15:48 

If you want him dead, have the guts. Why are we doing this passive murder?

Anne Brannen  15:54 

In King John’s case, when he was starving people to death in his castles, it’s pretty clear that he’s just mean.

Michelle Butler  16:00 

This desire to disappear people, but not actually own that you killed them, feels mushy to me.

Anne Brannen  16:08 

Yeah, it feels somewhat cowardly. It’s either cowardly or mean, or perhaps he just has a really, really bad case of ADHD and he forgot.

Michelle Butler  16:16 

There’s so much more in this crime, because you have this retaliatory killing of William that is the little pebble that starts the avalanche. The Normans had been struggling in Ulster before this for about 20 years, 25 years, they’ve been struggling. But before that, the de Bergs were the most powerful family in medieval Ireland, and they managed to screw themselves royally within a generation and totally lose hold of everything. It’s marvelous. Gill’s vengeance succeeded beyond her wildest dreams.

Anne Brannen  17:01 

Gill kind of drops out of the story. But really, Gill–Gill is the lynchpin for a lot, for a great deal of the badnesses that come later.

Michelle Butler  17:12 

Terrible things happen to the actual men who did the stabbing. But Gill and her husband get the hell out of Dodge and get to England.

Anne Brannen  17:21 

Oh, I didn’t know that. That’s hilarious.

Michelle Butler  17:24 

They managed to go into hiding, and everything’s fine for them.

Anne Brannen  17:28 

So they get away. Yeah, I should have wondered. I did not even wonder what happened to them. That’s good to know. Thank you.

Michelle Butler  17:36 

There’s a English, I don’t know, royal official, whose name is Darcy, who ends up dealing with the actual assassins in nasty ways.

Anne Brannen  17:46 

Oh what does he do?

Michelle Butler  17:47 

He pickles a few and fries a few and serves a few up cold–oh, no, that’s Gargamel. He does beheadings and hangings.

Anne Brannen  17:56 

The whole frying thing…I believe that the Tudors. We’re talking about Henry the eighth there.

Michelle Butler  18:02 

He was terrible.

Anne Brannen  18:03 

He was really.

Michelle Butler  18:05 

I just love this crime as an example of–it’s one of these little pivot points in history, because William wasn’t doing a bang up job as a teenage earl, but maybe he would have gotten it together?

Anne Brannen  18:22 

There are many young rulers who come into some kind of power who actually do manage to. They get some good advice, or they’re incredibly brilliant to begin with, and, you know, they hold it together.

Michelle Butler  18:35 

He’s roughly the same age that Edward the third was when Edward the third seizes the crown back from Isabelle and Mortimer and becomes amazing. But William just didn’t. He made some high handed decisions, one of which was throwing his cousin in the castle and leaving him to die. He apparently forgot that Norman women are also descended from Vikings. And she was mad.

Anne Brannen  19:05 

That’s right. At some point, really, what we ought to do a little retrospective where we just simply list the godawful Norman women, the badly behaved Norman women that we’ve covered, all of whom we love dearly. You and I. I believe at one point you told me that would be better to have Norman women be your models for behavior than Disney princesses. I believe you told me that once.

Michelle Butler  19:28 

And I stand by it. I would rather have had movies about Norman women than Disney princesses.

Anne Brannen  19:39 

They’re hell on wheels, the Norman women. They really are. I’m glad you put it on the list, because I liked it too. I have thought a lot about the plantation system and, you know, issues of Ulster, but I didn’t realize that it was basically one family that had driven the whole thing into the ground for the English.

Michelle Butler  19:59 

I’m mystified as to why I could not find fiction about these folks, because they seem desperate for a biopic or some historical novels.

Anne Brannen  20:14 

I think historical fiction would work really well with these people. I really do.

Michelle Butler  20:18 

I really thought I would find some, but I didn’t. Medieval Scotland gets lots. We have several movies about Robert the Bruce. We have several movies about William Wallace. Medieval Ireland needs better PR, because there is some good gory stuff in there that would make amazing movies.

Anne Brannen  20:41 

I think a movie about the de Bergs stupidly misbehaving themselves would be very good. Yeah, I think that would be good.

Michelle Butler  20:48 

I would love that.

Anne Brannen  20:50 

But you did find other things that you enjoyed, I believe you told me?

Michelle Butler  20:54 

I did. I found that even now, scholars are not unified in whose fault this was.

Anne Brannen  21:05 

Like, whose fault, but not Jill?

Michelle Butler  21:09 

Oh no, no, it’s generally team William or team Walter. There’s some people who think William was doing a pretty good job–

Anne Brannen  21:22 

Was there evidence for this?

Michelle Butler  21:24 

–and killing Walter was justified. Then there’s other people who are team Walter that this was ridiculous. So, for example, the Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland has chapters by different people and this particular chapter by Catherine Sims, 1989, this is very pro William. It does not mention that William was a child.

Anne Brannen  21:50 

Oh really. So you would read it and think he was like 35 at least.

Michelle Butler  21:54 

Yeah, it has phrases like William ‘found himself’ in the middle of this conflict. He did not. He was totally involved. And it claims, without evidence as far as I can tell, that William attempted to make peace. That’s a little bit like how people attempt to make peace by, you know, ‘well just do what I say and then we can get along.’

Anne Brannen  22:20 

Right, right. Negotiating with the Russians.

Michelle Butler  22:24 

Sims buys into the idea that there was a conspiracy, the idea that the reason that Walter got locked up was that, the claim was that the Earl of Desmond and Walter and another cousin were gonna depose William, and Desmond was going to become an actual king. There’s real disagreement about whether that was a real thing, but she says, ‘Oh yeah, totally was.’ She doesn’t say that Walter was killed or starved to death. She calls it the ‘death’ of Walter, but Earl William was ‘murdered.’ So that phrasing–

Anne Brannen  23:06 

Walter found himself dead.

Michelle Butler  23:09 

Walter found himself dead, yes. So that phrasing, really, this was very pro William. AJ Otway Rutherford’s 1980 A History of Medieval Ireland is also pro William. Walter was imprisoned, where he died. It’s very passive.

Anne Brannen  23:31 

He found himself dead there too.

Michelle Butler  23:36 

The Earl of Ulster was treacherously murdered by his own men.

Anne Brannen  23:40 

Uh, huh. Okay.

Michelle Butler  23:41 

So that’s a murder, but Walter dies.

Anne Brannen  23:45 

Yeah, from a cold or something, maybe the flu.

Michelle Butler  23:49 

It’s the same thing as the other book. There’s two books that I found that were not really taking a stance on it. One is the only standalone biography I found of anybody in this whole situation, and it’s called For Her Own Good: The Life of Elizabeth de Berg. It’s from 1999, and this is about William’s mom, so John de Berg’s wife. This one kind of goes, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ It says that William has youth and inexperience, and a contemporary chronicler has nice things to say about William, but modern assessments of him differ. Then she gives some examples of people who are pro William and people who think that William screwed things up. But interestingly, the Irish History Podcast, which I love, is pro Walter. It’s Walter all the way Fin Dwyer did a four part series on the fight between the de Bergs and the Fitzgeralds for power in Ulster and talks about how Richard de Berg and William Liath de Berg put together this enormous war machine, and how it falls apart after they die. But he is definitely pro Walter. He thinks that this was insane, that William has his cousin locked up.

Anne Brannen  25:08 

I think we can agree that William was not a good administrator.

Michelle Butler  25:18 

It’s a strange decision to make too because he wasn’t even raised in Ireland. He was raised in England. So it’s a real problem to bring him back over. He doesn’t have the network. He’s not a known commodity. It’s really expecting a lot. He wasn’t set up to succeed, is what I mean.

Anne Brannen  25:40 

He doesn’t have the training, he doesn’t have the resources, and he’s been stuck someplace that he probably doesn’t like much.

Michelle Butler  25:50 

And there’s tourism.

Anne Brannen  25:52 

Oh, hon, so we’re gonna have tourism now. I should mention that one of the things that we’ve been talking about, because we have these side projects in our heads that we don’t actually do, but, you know, we talk about–one of the projects is to put together an interactive map of True Crime Medieval places to visit.

Michelle Butler  26:15 

That would be great.

Anne Brannen  26:18 

Okay, at any rate. Tourism. What’d you find?

Michelle Butler  26:23 

The castle where Walter found himself dead kinda survives.

Anne Brannen  26:32 

It finds itself in ruins.

Michelle Butler  26:36 

It’s Northburg Castle. The ruins are still there and can be visited. They’re owned by Irish heritage. It doesn’t survive, because it was blown to smithereens in the 16th century. It was being used to garrison English soldiers, and there was an attack, and then they decided to abandon it rather than repair it. But the ruins are there, and we can go see where Walter became dead.

Anne Brannen  27:11 

So there’s definitely no tea because it’s ruins, but they do let you go walk around.

Michelle Butler  27:18 

You can go walk around in it. The drone footage…god, I love drone footage. This is a game changer with getting to see places I haven’t been to yet. You can see in the drone footage that it’s right beside a brand new housing division, like a subdivision. Wouldn’t that be the coolest darn thing ever, that you buy your new townhouse and right across the street are the ruins of an early 14th century castle?

Anne Brannen  27:50 

Oh, it’d be great to be a kid there, wouldn’t it? A lot of places to climb all around.

Michelle Butler  27:55 

But the place really to go see is Carrickfergus castle. Carrickfergus is beautifully preserved.

Anne Brannen  28:10 

Tea Room? Tea Room?

Michelle Butler  28:12 

Probably.

Anne Brannen  28:13 

Okay.

Michelle Butler  28:14 

It’s got …not statues exactly, because they’re not bronze. They have painted effigies throughout the castle demonstrating how people lived there.

Anne Brannen  28:27 

Oh, cool.

Michelle Butler  28:29 

It’s so cool. And they’re dressed so you can tell the difference between the 17th century guys that are manning the walls and the 12th century or the 14th century. They’re dressed according to…I’m so excited about this. Oh my gosh.

Anne Brannen  28:46 

I see so much smurging in different places of clothing from several 100 years in Europe. Yeah, lovely.

Michelle Butler  28:57 

This castle has a fascinating history. This little point in time is fascinating, when it was the de Bergs’, but it is interesting before, and it’s interesting after. It’s built by John de Corsi, who was a knight who tried and succeeded for a while to make himself King of Ulster during the original English invasion. He came with Henry the second, but he ran afoul of King John when he started minting his own coins.

Anne Brannen  29:32 

Okay, yeah, no. Kings and presidents really hate that, when you, um, make money.

Michelle Butler  29:40 

Being de facto king of Ulster was okay. Actually asserting that you are king of Ulster by making your own coins, not okay.

Anne Brannen  29:51 

Or, like, what was that wonderful place we were talking about…Lundy, the Isle of Lundy, where you had to actually go through customs to go in. It. Even though it really belonged to Devon. Yeah, that’s blurry. So want to go there, I really do.

Michelle Butler  30:09 

Oh my gosh, the Isle of Lundy. Speaking of magnets for crazy people.

Anne Brannen  30:16 

Yeah, that.

Michelle Butler  30:19 

So things were good for John de Corsi until they weren’t and he had to flee because King John basically showed up and said, ‘This is a nice castle you built for me. Now, scram.’ What’s he gonna do?

Anne Brannen  30:33 

Well, he’s lucky John didn’t starve him down in the basement.

Michelle Butler  30:36 

He got off lightly, given that it was John. He did actually attempt to come back. He went off to England. He got a force together, and he tried to come back, but he had built the castle too well, and he couldn’t.

Anne Brannen  30:50 

Hoist on your own petard.

Michelle Butler  30:51 

John expands the castle, and puts a curtain wall around it. So before it had been kind of the standard Norman keep, and now it’s got a curtain wall and everything. This castle withstood Edward the Bruce’s siege for a year.

Anne Brannen  31:10 

Wow.

Michelle Butler  31:11 

A year. They were stocked so well. Now it is true that Edward did not show up with siege engines, so he was literally just sitting outside waiting for them to starve. But it took a year.

Anne Brannen  31:25 

Where were they getting the water from? Are they by a river?

Michelle Butler  31:29 

They’re right on Belfast Bay.

Anne Brannen  31:33 

Okay, yes, that’ll work.

Michelle Butler  31:35 

There are rumors that there was cannibalism during that time, but it’s because Edward would send Scottish emissaries to try to negotiate a surrender, and they would never come back.

Anne Brannen  31:51 

So they might have eaten them, or they might have just, you know, thrown them out a window. Okay.

Michelle Butler  31:56 

Yeah, we don’t know. This castle is the seat of English power in Northern Ireland for hundreds of years. It’s a lot like Calais in France, where everything else around it they don’t own, but they got this little toehold. The castle is maintained and updated over the years, so there are cannons there now. It makes the transition into being a 17th century fortress into a 18th century fortress. It–and this blows my mind–it was under the control of the English War Department–not just the English government, the English War Department–until 1928. 

Anne Brannen  32:44 

Really.

Michelle Butler  32:46 

It was considered to be defensively important. But then, of course, after independence, it was just such a bone of contention.

Anne Brannen  32:58 

Got it.

Michelle Butler  32:59 

They had to hand it over at that point. That is mind blowing, that it was militarily, tactically important for 600 years.

Anne Brannen  33:13 

And it’s amazing it still exists. So many places that actually are very important tactically get destroyed because they’re very important tactically. So that’s a place to go.

Michelle Butler  33:25 

Oh yeah. I enjoyed watching all the drone footage of Carrickfergus Castle. There’s a episode of Secrets of Great Castles, by Dan Jones, about it. So there’s a lot you can watch.

Anne Brannen  33:41 

So you’ll link to some of this.

Michelle Butler  33:43 

About Carrick Fergus. But the actual castle of Walter’s death is kind of, sort of still there. It’s in bits.

Anne Brannen  33:56 

Yes, I saw the walls are, like, not whole and kind of short, and there’s a bunch of grass and mounds of dirt and grass growing all over things. But no historical fiction.

Michelle Butler  34:14 

Not that I could find. I’m willing to be proved wrong and have somebody send me something. But I didn’t. I found some 19th century books about the de Berg family, but their family histories. I found a book that the de Berg family commissions later on in the 17th century. But that’s not fiction.

Anne Brannen  34:40 

The history of our wonderful family and why we don’t live in Connacht anymore.

Michelle Butler  34:47 

Let me look up what the Book of the Bergs is, because I looked at it just enough to realize it’s a illuminated manuscript.

Anne Brannen  34:54 

Cool.

Michelle Butler  34:55 

It’s made between 1571 and 1580 and it’s a genealogy of the house with pictures of them. So it’s not fiction. It’s them. You know, this is our illustrious family, which I think is what you just said.

Anne Brannen  35:12 

Yeah. I mean, that’s usually what the genealogies are. And you find it referred to all the time if you’re working in genealogy. Whether or not actually it is a truthful or lying sort of thing, I cannot say. I mean, I know there’s many–as I’ve mentioned–there’s a lot of difficulties with de Berg genealogy. I don’t know if that manuscript is.

Michelle Butler  35:35 

Maybe that’s one of the problems, because it does claim to have them descending from Charlemagne, the kings of Jerusalem, France and England.

Anne Brannen  35:47 

I do know. Yes. This is the one that causes the problems. This is the manuscript that causes the problems. Thank you. If it’s the one that says they descend from Charlemagne. They might, well–I mean, I expect they do, because pretty much, if you are in Europe, the chances that you’re descended from Charlemagne are pretty high. But what the line is, we don’t know.

Michelle Butler  36:13 

It’s possible there’s historical fiction about this that I just didn’t find. One of the complexities is that there was a guy named John Burke who writes about the American Civil War. So if you Google Burke Civil War historical fiction, you find him. But I tried lots of permutations and did not find anything so I think if there was somebody who had written a six book series about the Burke family in Northern Ireland, I think I would have found it. But if somebody else knows of one, send it to me. I pretty sure that it’s not out there in any sort of big thing. Nonetheless, this was a great crime.

Anne Brannen  37:02 

It was a lot of stuff, wasn’t it. I did like it. It was fun. Thank you.

Michelle Butler  37:08 

Holy cow, do not cross Gill de Berg.

Anne Brannen  37:12 

No. Do you know where they go in England?

Michelle Butler  37:18 

I’d have to look that back up.

Anne Brannen  37:19 

So that’s us talking about the de Bergs. I suppose that’s it.

Michelle Butler  37:23 

That is all I got. Carrickfergus.

Anne Brannen  37:27 

Carrickfergus and some really vexed genealogies and some very bad behavior. The next time that y’all hear from us, we’re going to Italy. I believe that’s where Pino the third Ordaloffi is. You put this one on so I’m guessing.

Michelle Butler  37:43 

Okay, cool.

Anne Brannen  37:44 

He poisons people from 1466 to 1473 so we’re going to go talk about some poisonings. So, later and a different part of Europe. Yep, that’s what we’ll do. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today only with less technology. You can find us on Apple podcasts and Spotify and any place really that the podcasts are hanging out. You can find us directly on truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. There you can find links to the podcast and show notes and transcripts when we get them up. We do them when we can, as soon as we can. There’s an index so that if you’re looking for a subject, you can find it. Like if you say to yourself, ‘the white ship, what happened there?’ You can look that up, and then go there. You can leave comments, and you can get a hold of us. We’d love to hear from you, especially if you’ve got crimes. I believe in a couple of weeks, we’re doing a crime that a listener sent in. So that’ll be nice. I believe, yes, I believe we’re going back to the Middle East for this. So we’ll come back and talk to you about poisonings. There’s no poison involved in this one, just, you know, neglecting to feed people, which, if you do long enough, becomes a terrible crime.

Michelle Butler  39:09 

That part’s weird also, because did they actually have access…? We talked about this with Maude de Braose. Is it actually starvation, or is it dying of thirst? Because starvation is is really, really terrible. To do that, that would take a very long time if you’re giving people access to water. If you’re denying people water, it’s going to be a three day situation.

Anne Brannen  39:33 

Yes. It’s very, very terrible, but not as long. Pretty terrible, though. We don’t really know. It’s just being called starvation. They were put someplace and not given sustenance. They had air, which is one of the sustenances we need. Whether or not they had water and food, we don’t know. At least they did not have food. We’ll go talk about another horrible crime next time. Bye.

Michelle Butler  39:54 

Oh goody! Bye.

101. Defenestrations of Prague, Prague, Bohemia 1419, 1483, 1618

Anne Brannen  0:24 

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:33 

And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:37 

Today we are talking about not just one crime, but a few of them, because we want to talk about the defenestrations of Prague, which happened in 1419, 1483, and also 1618. Different numbering systems number them differently, depending on which ones you think are the most important, but that’s what we want to talk about. We want to talk about defenestrations. Prague was in Bohemia, which is now Western Czech Republic. We’re going to talk about defenestrations. Michelle, how did we end up with this? You put this on the list. What was it that caught you?

Michelle Butler  1:16 

I’m pretty sure that this was suggested by a listener.

Anne Brannen  1:20 

Oooo, the listeners. Because they’re awesome. This is an interesting topic. We haven’t found a boring one yet, to us at least.

Michelle Butler  1:31 

Well, that’s true.

Anne Brannen  1:32 

When I told Laura that we were going to be recording today on the defenestrations of Prague, she says, defenestrations sound like you go around and take out people’s windows, which I thought was a very good translation of the Latin. ‘I’m going to defenestrate.’ But no, defenestrations means throwing somebody out of a window. So in Prague, there’s a series of events, and they figure really large in Czech history, and also the history of Europe at this point. In 1419, a mob threw several important town leaders out of the windows of the New Town Hall. In 1483, several town councilors got thrown out of the windows of the Old Town Hall. In 1618, the Regents of the King got thrown out of the windows of the Chancellery at Prague Castle. This series of events, they’re all related, not just by being in Prague and involving throwing people out of window, but also because they’re all connected. They’re part of the Catholic- Protestant conflicts that were going on in Europe for basically hundreds of years. Because of that, they’re related to politics, because the religious conflicts were also political conflicts, because humans, don’t you know. So defenestration. Defenestration has this long history. The defenestrations of the humans did not only happen in Prague. Throwing out of windows, especially when you’re really angry–it’s not an uncommon response to being really angry with someone and having a window nearby that’s a good distance above the ground. You can kill an opponent in many different ways. But if you throw them out the window, you kind of get rid of them. Beyond just killing, they’re like ‘out of my sight. Get out.’ Completely getting them out of the realm of this political entity, wherever you’re sitting, and it’s also very nicely dramatic. So it’s satisfactory that way, at least, even if it’s only fleeting satisfaction, and it’s nicely symbolic. We’ve got many examples of it through history. Famously, the first one that comes to many minds would be Jezebel getting thrown out of her window and then left to be eaten by dogs, so they had trouble burying her. We’ve had a podcast about that time in 1452 that the king, King James of Scotland, got really, really, really annoyed at William Douglas while they were having a political discussion, and so James threw William Douglas out a window at Sterling castle. There’s another religious political conflict, Gaspard, the second de Coligny was finally dispatched after there had been another assassination attempt where he got shot and he lost a finger to a bullet, by being pushed out of a window of his own house. That was in 1572 and that led to the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which we’re going to talk about in another podcast. It’s going to be a nice special event, because it’s kind of past the middle ages a little bit. So defenestrations often lead to other things on account of all that, you know, symbolism and dramatic quality and whatnot.

Michelle Butler  1:33 

We’ve had defenestrations before, but they typically happened post mortem rather than being the actual cause of death. We had Andrew getting thrown out the window with Joanna of Naples after he was dead, and there was Beatrice Cenci–wasn’t her father…?

Anne Brannen  4:52 

Yes, yes, yes. Beatrice Cenci’s father, got thrown out of a window, but I think he was already–they threw the body out of the window because he was already dead, yes. There was also the conspirators of the Pazzi conspiracy. They got hung out of the window. So they did die by going out of the window, but not by hitting the ground. It was because they were hung, so I don’t think you call that defenestration. I think you call that hanging out the window. Slightly different.

Michelle Butler  5:20 

It’s got this humiliation component.

Anne Brannen  5:23 

It does, doesn’t it? It really does. The founder of the Latter Day Saints, Joseph Smith, was defenestrated out of the Carthage Jail in Carthage, Illinois. That was in 1844, a mob–

Michelle Butler  5:39 

That is the next town over from where I am from.

Anne Brannen  5:42 

You know, I did not actually know that.

Michelle Butler  5:46 

Yep. Carthage and Nauvoo were both just a few miles away from where I grew up in Dallas City.

Anne Brannen  5:54 

I did not know that. So now I have a whole picture of your ancestors going over to Carthage. And still on the topic of defenestration, it’s common knowledge now that Russian businessmen and military guys and politicians fall out of windows, sometimes they stab themselves and then fall out of the windows. We’re really familiar with this trope of Russians getting thrown out of windows. Everybody knows that, you know, if there’s a possibility that the FSB, which is the current successor of the KGB, if the FSB has you in their sights, you really don’t want to be near any windows or drink tea, I understand. But that’s just a handful of the long political and religious defenestration list in history. So we’re going to return to Bohemia. The background to the 1419 defenestration of Prague is the Hus movement, which was a reformation movement founded by the reformer Jan Hus, so part of the Bohemian reformation, which started in Prague in like the 1370s, a movement which was meant not to break away from Catholicism, but to reform Roman Catholicism. There were problems of badly behaved priests and uneducated priests and the selling of indulgences and just a lack of focus in general on modesty and humility and charity and things like that. And so that was part of the Reformation. The Reformation in Europe wasn’t always about ‘let us not be Catholics.’ It was very, very often about ‘let us fix the church.’ So that’s what that was, originally. The Hussites. It had been founded by Jan Hus who was a professor, a preacher, from Prague. He wrote a lot in Czech so that priests who had trouble reading Latin could actually read what he was saying. This is at the time of the movement toward using the vernacular, using people’s languages, their own languages, to talk about religion with them. He said that Jesus was the high authority. We don’t need the intercession of the church and whatnot. The Roman Catholic Church was not fond of this position, so he got executed in 1415 at the Council of Constance. That’s Constance, in what’s now Germany. The Hussite movement continued, and it still exists. The Moravian Church is Hussite. And Jan Zelivsky–here’s a little segueway. I wanted to know how to say this name. Jan Zelivsky. So I went and I Googled pronounced this name, and I got this voice telling me that it was “Jaan Zalissky,” which I thought must probably be wrong, because it sounded like it was being said in American. So I did some more research. Jan Zelivsky, who was a Hus priest, led a procession to the New Town Hall. Now–another little segueway here. Prague had Old Town, which was the center of the municipality to begin with, and then there was New Town, which was built by one of the kings was right next to it, but a different. There was two different town halls, and then there’s also, we’re going to hear about, Lesser Town, which is across the river, and smaller. Okay, fine. So Jan Zelivsky led a procession to the New Town Hall, where Hussite prisoners were being held by the Catholic authorities. Because since Hus’ execution, the  Hussites had, rather than getting all cowed, they’d gotten stronger. This is one of the things you see very often. We were just talking about this before we started recording, because we were thinking about a current bunch of demonstrations going on in the Republic of Georgia, and how often, when you take fire hoses and tear gas to people, they don’t say to themselves, ‘Oh, we should go home. This obviously is wrong.’ They call it their neighbors, and they make things bigger. So that’s what happened here. The Hussites had not been cowed ever since Hus’ execution. They were stronger. They were definitely angry, and the Hussites demanded that the Hussite prisoners be released, and the Catholics threw a rock at them, which hit Zelivsky, and the mob stormed the hall. They weren’t a procession at that point anymore. They moved from being a procession to being a mob. You know, sometimes you can’t really tell exactly what the line is, but we’re over it now. So they were a mob. They went into the town hall and they threw the judge and the town mayor and several counselors out the window, and they were all killed. In fact, one of the witnesses said that they were thrown out the window, and the Hussites outside were holding spears, and they fell onto the spears. They’re all dead at this point. The news of this, by the way, apparently killed King Wenceslas the fourth. When he heard it, he had a stroke, and he died. Maybe this wasn’t true, but everybody said it was, and this first defenestration of Prague caused a rise in the Hussite movement. It made it even stronger, and it started the Hussite wars, which were a religious conflict between the Hussites and the Roman Catholics, and is also political as well, because the Catholic influence in Bohemia was associated with the Germans. It was the German Catholics who were there. In Prague, the Catholic Germans were forced out. Sigismund, who was Wenceslas’ brother, launched a crusade against the Hussites, which attracted crusaders from all over Europe. We were talking about this in a whole other podcast about the history of crusades, because if you wanted to be on a crusade, you did not actually have to go to the Holy Land. No, no. That cost a lot of money, and it was far away, and ships were involved and, you know, trying not to get robbed. No, you could go someplace much closer in Europe, maybe down to, you know, the South of France, or over to Prague. So crusaders came from all over Europe, but the Hussites pushed the Crusaders out. The Hussites then had internal conflicts, and so the Germans started another crusade, but the Hussites defeated that crusade too. At that point, the German territories then had too many internal conflicts, and so they couldn’t put a viable crusade together, and Lithuania and Poland like just would not flight Bohemia. Why would they? The Danes all went home, and the Hussites went and took part of the German territories. So there were five crusades altogether against the Hussites, but eventually the moderate Hussites managed to kind of squelch the more radical Hussites, and they were given some of their demands. So they reformed the Catholic rites in Bohemia to some point. And so then there was a kind of little peace. By the way, I don’t know if this is one of the things that Michelle ran into, but it’s the kind of thing that she would have loved if she did. One of the reasons–because you might say to yourself, why are the Hussites doing so well against all these forces of European Crusaders?–and the reason is, they were using advanced military technology. Did you run into that?

Michelle Butler  13:34 

Such as?

Anne Brannen  13:36 

They were using different forms of guns.

Michelle Butler  13:41 

Oh, interesting.

Anne Brannen  13:42 

Yeah, they won. Okay, we’re gonna move on the second defenestration of Prague, because there’s three of these things, and we need me to not talk about history for four hours. The second defenestration of Prague did not lead to such dramatic events as the first one did. In 1483, though the Hussite wars had been over for decades, there was still tension between the Hussites, who were associated with Newtown, and the Catholic officials who were in Old Town. The more radical Hussites who had been squelched earlier, they’re still around, and they wanted the Hussite doctrine of communion in two kinds. That means the regular laity, the regular people, having communion not just in the form of bread, but also wine. They thought this was only fair. Many sects had thought this was only fair. They wanted that to be the rite observed in the realm. So they went to the Old Town Hall, and they staged a coup. In that coup, they threw a bunch of the Old Town counselors and some Catholic clergy out the windows of the Old Town Hall. The coup encompassed New Town as well, along with Lesser Town across the river. The next month, all three sections of the city signed a treaty that gave the Hussite radicals dominion in the city. It gave them a lot more power. This actually is probably why the Hussite movement remains so strong and still exists in things like the Mennonite Church. It did not disappear, and it led a couple years later to the equality of the two churches in the city. So Roman Catholic churches, Hussite churches–they’re being all equal. But that was brief. Dead people, yes, sorry about that, but we move on. The third of the Prague defenestrations came in 1618, a couple hundred years after the first one, and would lead to the 30 Years War. If you know Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children, that’s the war that play is set in. It’s a pretty good depiction of that war too, as far as I can tell.

Michelle Butler  15:49 

Interesting. I did not know that.

Anne Brannen  15:51 

Yes. Mother Courage. War is good for business, she says. What happened to create the third defenestration is as follows. The Holy Roman Empire had been being fragmented by holy wars, and in 1555 this was nominally settled by the peace of Augsburg, which allowed the rulers of the various realms of the Holy Roman Empire to choose either Lutheranism or Roman Catholicism as the official religion in their realm. Doesn’t that sound like a great idea? Nothing could go wrong. Could it? Hmmm. So instead of the Emperor telling what you were all supposed to be, or the king, everybody got to decide in their place what was going on. The leader got to decide this.

Michelle Butler  16:39 

I’m sure that will solve it all, and everything will be peaceful after that.

Anne Brannen  16:43 

Yeah, because that’s history now, and there’s been no wars until recently. The thing was, this wasn’t easily enforced in everybody’s separate realms. And in 1618, sometime after that nice agreement that was going to solve everything, Ferdinand the second, who was then the new Habsburg emperor, decided that really his territories were going to be Catholic, and if his territories were going to be Catholic, it wasn’t just that he was going to say that’s what they were, he needed to suppress the Protestants, especially the Bohemian ones. You can see where this is going. So in Bohemia, the Habsburgs, since 1526 had allowed the Protestants to practice their religion, and this Habsburg decided that wasn’t going to be happening. He was very strongly part of the Catholic Counter Reformation, which was the Catholic movement to reform Catholicism against, you know, the reformation of the Protestants. And basically keep everybody under the Roman Catholic umbrella, which, if you look around, you know did not actually work. But he was part of that. So first thing he did, he ordered Protestant chapels that were being built on royal land to stop being built. He just stopped it right there. He dissolved the Bohemian councils when they objected to this. On May the fourth, Catholic regents of the Emperor went to the Bohemian chancellery that was at Prague Castle at like 8:30 in the morning. Very early. And then the dissolved assembly counselors came by about 9:30 and they wanted to know–these poor, dissolved counselors. They’re not really dissolved. Their assembly was dissolved. They’re actually in their bodies, and everything’s okay with them at the moment. They wanted to know if these regents, these Catholic regents, were the people who had managed to talk the Emperor into halting the church construction and dissolving the assembly. Wikipedia gives you this account of what was going on as written by one of the Catholics: “One of the lords read aloud a letter with the following approximate content, ‘his Imperial Majesty had sent to their graces the Lord regents, a sharp letter that was by our request, issued to us as a copy after the original had been read aloud, and in which his Majesty declared all of our lives and honor already forfeit, thereby greatly frightening all three Protestant estates,'” –I think that only makes sense–“as they also absolutely intended to proceed with the execution against us, we came to a unanimous agreement among ourselves that regardless of any loss of life and limb, honor and property, we would stand firm with all for one and one for all. Nor would we be subservient, but rather we would loyally help and protect each other to the utmost against all difficulties. Because, however, it is clear that such a letter came about through the advice of some of our religious enemies. We wish to know, and hereby ask the Lord regents present if all or some of them knew of the letter, recommended it and approved it.” All right. So the letter that upset the Protestants. Did you or did you not? The Catholics asked for a few days to consult with their superior about this, which I find kind of hilarious. I mean, did you or did you not, personally approve this letter? I think that really you could answer that without asking your superior. The Protestants I were of my thinking here. They wanted an immediate answer, and so they looked into all this immediately. Two of the regents were declared innocent because they were so deeply pious that they could not possibly have done these bad things, and so they were sent out of the room. So they’re safe. Bye, goodbye. The other three took responsibility for the letter, but instead of arresting them, the Protestants threw them out the window. However, oddly enough, they all survived. I guess for one thing, we’re not talking about a mob with spears waiting for them to come out the window. There’s nobody out there. They all survived, even though they were on the third floor. The Catholics said that it had to do with divine intervention. It was like Mary or angels or Saint Michael, some divine entity, had saved them, but the Protestants said they landed in a dung heap. Now, this event led to the Bohemian revolt in which the Protestants sought more freedom, political and religious both, because it’s such a dramatic and invigorating event. They’re really, ‘it was great, throwing the Catholic regents out the window.’ It was a big deal. The Protestants, however, were not able to attract any allies, because they had invested a Protestant as King of Bohemia and deposed an elected King and emperor, which would be Frederick. So they couldn’t attract allies. Other kingdoms were not going to fight with them, and the Catholics won the battle of White Mountain a few months later–that’s the beginning of the 30 Years War, and the Protestants weren’t in any way mollified when 27 Prague nobles and citizens were tortured and executed in the Old Town, and then their heads were hung off the Old Town bridge. That wasn’t any good. So the 30 Years War was on, and it was brutal. It spread over large parts of Central Europe, in particular the German territories and several major powers, Denmark, Sweden, France and Spain were involved. When it ended–it ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648–things had radically changed. The treaty established what would be the foundation of the nation-state system in Europe, so that these nations were in charge of themselves and not in liege to each other. It altered irrevocably the economies and the social structures of large swathes of German territory. Local governments collapsed. Landless peasants were victimized, robbed and murdered, and raped by soldiers from both sides. There were rebellions in Austria and Bavaria and Brandenburg. Entire ecosystems were ravaged by soldiers who were destroying where they were. As they went along, they destroyed what was behind them. There were spikes in the numbers of rodents and wolves and wild pigs. The worst of the witch hunts began, starting in this area in 1626. And there was a literary movement to purify the German language, which was great in that there was a revival of German literature, but dangerous in some other ways, which I think are very obvious to us now. So that’s the defenestrations of Prague, which were all about the Hussites and Protestantism and the Catholics. That’s what it all led to. The 30 Years War. But by the way, my ending little thing here. There were other defenestrations in Prague that aren’t included in this major list, but the big one of them is in 1948, John Masaryk, who was the foreign minister at the Czechoslovak communist government, was thrown out of a bathroom window at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, having been thrown out either by the communist government that he worked for or by the Soviet secret services. It was listed as a suicide, but it’s pretty clear now that it was not. He was in his pajamas, and he went out the bathroom. I’m fascinated now by Prague–an incredibly powerful hub of religious thinking, not just conflict, but religious thinking through the end of the Middle Ages and the early modern era. Where’d you find Michelle? You were telling me some interesting things. What you got?

Michelle Butler  24:23 

What I didn’t find is as interesting as what I found. I fully expected to find lots of fiction.

Anne Brannen  24:32 

I can imagine.

Michelle Butler  24:34 

The thing is,I didn’t. I found lots of stuff on the internet. The internet loves the defenestrations of Prague. There’s lots of YouTube videos. There’s historical ones. They’re in the realm of the St Scholastica riots. They are sensationalized, but not as much as with St Olga, which were really over the top. These are fairly decent. But of course, they’re just fascinated by the idea of throwing people out of windows. There’s a ton of memes. There’s a particular one about, ‘wait, there’s a special word for throwing people out of windows?’ It’s one of the places where Alex’s favorite little Gen Z saying, ‘If I had a nickel for every time someone threw a political opponent out of the window in Prague, I’d have three nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird it happened more than once.’ That’s one of his favorite little statements. So I ran across that a lot too. There’s this huge cultural awareness on the internet. It’s one of these places where, it’s all over the internet, and every single blog post starts with “This is this thing that nobody’s ever heard of!” Wait, what? When? Because everybody seems to have heard of it. So that was fascinating. There’s a giant presence on the internet, but there’s quite a lot of artwork, and there was contemporary pamphlets and stuff. Everybody’s got to make sure that their interpretation of events gets out there. But I did not find fiction. If you had asked me before we did the killing of Henry de Almayne, did I think I was going to find more historical fiction about Henry de Almayne being killed in the church versus the defenestrations of Prague, I absolutely would have told you I was going to find more about the defenestrations of Prague. But that’s not how it turned out. There are quite a lot of indirect references. There are a lot of novels set in the 30 Years War, including at least two by–and this guy has popped up before–GA Henty, who wrote a lot of boys’ books in the 19th century. Boys adventure books. He wrote at least two that are set in the 30 Years War, but not about the defenestrations. Any of them. Which is wild. There’s two American bands–two separate American bands–named the defenestration of Prague.

Anne Brannen  27:02 

Wow.

Michelle Butler  27:03 

Isn’t that wild? I really would not have thought I was gonna find more bands than books. It’s so weird. One is in Wisconsin, and records songs in Czech, and one is in Oklahoma, and they record instrumental folk music, and I think the accordion is a strong presence.

Anne Brannen  27:26 

So the defenestration of Prague polka. Is that what we going on here?

Michelle Butler  27:30 

I got nothing. I found it. I’m reporting on it. I can’t make it make sense. I found a movie about Jan Ziska, who was involved in the first defenestration, and I really thought, ‘All right, I’ve struck gold here,’ but that’s not what the movie’s about. It doesn’t even show up in the movie. It’s about his career as an undefeated leader in war.

Anne Brannen  28:01 

Okay.

Michelle Butler  28:02 

It’s a recent movie. It’s from like, three years ago, 2022, and it was filmed in the Czech Republic.

Anne Brannen  28:13 

Where they do know about the defenestrations of Prague, because they consider it an important part of their history.

Michelle Butler  28:18 

It’s just called Medieval. I watched the trailer and decided that was enough, because it wasn’t relevant to my specific–I’m not saying I think it’s a bad movie. I really can’t tell. Michael Caine has a little role in it. So there’s that. It’s in English, it’s not in Czech, but it wasn’t relevant so I didn’t watch it.

Anne Brannen  28:38 

You might have done if it looked really great.

Michelle Butler  28:40 

Yeah. I had other threads to pursue. I was trying really hard. Why on earth is there no presence? So I just kept looking and looking, but didn’t find it. Didn’t find anything directly relevant. I found a 1983 collection of poems called Defenestration of Prague.

Anne Brannen  29:01 

What year, tell me again.

Michelle Butler  29:03 

1983.

Anne Brannen  29:06 

All right.

Michelle Butler  29:10 

This is not a minor work by some poet nobody’s ever heard of. This is a book by a major American poet named Susan Howe.

Anne Brannen  29:19 

Oh, yes.

Michelle Butler  29:20 

Okay, so this is someone you’ve heard of. She’s an American poet born in 1937 and this, I think, is a really interesting use of the defenestration as a metaphor or as a window through which to have other commentary. Let me quote what this person says, “Defenestration of Prague subtly comments on the division between Ireland and Northern Ireland through the title poem’s restaging of an incident in Prague in 1617 when Catholic clerics were thrown from windows to their deaths by supporters of Calvinism.”

Anne Brannen  30:01 

Huh.

Michelle Butler  30:01 

That’s from Poetry foundation.org, which is, you know, kind of true, but I think that’s really interesting.

Anne Brannen  30:09 

It sure is. And I’m going to go find that.

Michelle Butler  30:11 

It’s not about the defenestration, but it is using it as a metaphor to talk about Ireland and Northern Ireland, which, of course, was a very big issue in the 1980s. That was kind of the height of the IRA bombings. We’re more than a decade before the Good Friday Accords in 1996 and we’re a good decade, if not decade and a half, into the troubles. So it really is the height of the troubles. I will say that having read a little bit of the poem, I would not necessarily have gotten that on my own. But there’s a quote from the poet, where they have an excerpt of the poem, and she is quoted as saying, ‘people often tell me, my work is difficult. I have the sinking feeling they mean difficult as in hopeless.’ So I don’t feel as bad as I might have done, not understanding that this is about Ireland, and maybe it’s easier if you have the whole entire poem, because this is just an excerpt. It’s on the Paris Review.org. So that’s, I think, worth pursuing, and I think it’s really interesting, but it’s not actually about the defenestration. It’s using it as a way to talk about something else.

Anne Brannen  31:39 

Well, you know, one of the things that I had been thinking about and had mentioned when I was talking about defenestration, why defenestration?–is that it does have this symbolism and this energy to it that just, you know, killing somebody in the room doesn’t have. So that’s interesting, because that’s one of the things that’s happening, is then that this symbolism of it is used in other realms.

Michelle Butler  32:05 

And it is true that a lot of the things I found were references to the defenestration being used as a metaphor. As far as I can tell, if you get fired in the Czech Republic, it is a-okay for you to call that a defenestration.

Anne Brannen  32:20 

Oh, sweet.

Michelle Butler  32:22 

I ran across that a lot.

Anne Brannen  32:23 

Oh, that is so…so it’s part of the common parlance. It’s gone into the language. I love that.

Michelle Butler  32:33 

That’s really interesting. I also found a novel, a brand new novel from 2022 called Defenestrate, and it is by Renee Branham. It is fascinating. I’m not done with it yet. The audiobook is eight and a half hours long, so I’m doing my best here. But it is about a set of twins named Nick and Marta. Nick is a boy. Marta is a girl. They are Americans of Czech descent, and their mother is haunted by and passes along her fretting, her concern, about a family curse that they die by falling. Supposedly, this was caused by a great-grandfather who pushed a stone mason to his death because he was convinced that the stone mason had seduced his daughter, and this led to the family fleeing to America. Marta is constantly telling stories in bars to men who try to pick her up of all of her relatives who’ve fallen to their deaths.Nick falls from a fifth story window. He survives, but he’s injured. Marta becomes concerned it was a suicide attempt, not an accident. So this is really fascinating book. I’m enjoying it, but again, it’s being used as metaphor, background, impetus to imagination. Not being engaged with. I don’t know, maybe it’s too ridiculous to try to write real historical fiction about. I don’t know. I thought I would find it and I didn’t. What I did find, though, is a whole lot of tourism.

Anne Brannen  34:22 

Ta-da!

Michelle Butler  34:24 

Yay! Much in the same way that the Pied Piper of Hamlin, that they’re going at it for all they’re worth, and Elizabeth Bathory’s hometown is buying in, tour companies run tours where you can go and see.

Anne Brannen  34:43 

So do you get to go to all three places? So you to New Town Hall, Old Town Hall, and Prague Castle?

Michelle Butler  34:46 

Yep, they take you around to the different sites. My absolute favorite, favorite thing that I found, bar none, is the reenactment in 2019 of the first defenestration in commemoration of the 600th anniversary. I found picture and video, and the the poster is awesome.

Anne Brannen  34:49 

Are you gonna link…?

Michelle Butler  34:53 

Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, yes. You need to see this poster. It is wild. They’re not using mannequins. They have actual stunt people who go out the window.

Anne Brannen  35:29 

If you were actually, like, throwing mannequins out the window, it really would kind of border on the historically ridiculous So, stunt people. So they got to hire these guys.

Michelle Butler  35:37 

Oh my goodness, I had found references to this a little while ago, but I was doing, of course, my last minute cramming, and found video of the reenactment. I’m so excited. And the poster, oh my gosh. The poster is the funniest damn thing, because it’s got the crowd standing there with all of the halbards and the spears and everything, and the people raining down, these three bodies raining down on them. It’s raining men, and it’s hilarious. This is closer, of course, to what we found with the pirate.

Anne Brannen  36:25 

Oh yes. I remember. The pirates who were tormenting the Hanseatic League.

Michelle Butler  36:31 

Yes. The Victualler Brothers. That was award winning tourism development. They were committed to that. But this is pretty good.

Anne Brannen  36:45 

I’m so pleased by this. I’m not surprised they would take a bus and go around and have someone show you the three different places. But that there would be reenactments, that’s too adorable. It really is. The humans are very delightful.

Michelle Butler  37:00 

The poster is just my favorite piece of this. Now this happened in 2019 or in 2009. I’m finding different… some people are saying 2019 and some are saying 2009, and I don’t know, maybe they’re doing it all the time. I’m about to send you the poster so you can see the poster.

Anne Brannen  37:21 

Okay, I’m gonna go and I’m gonna go look at this.

Michelle Butler  37:23 

The whole entire thing is awesome, but the poster is a particular favorite.

Anne Brannen  37:28 

Oh, that is just horrible. It’s very sad, very sad. Yep, they got the swords. That’s very good. Thank you.

Michelle Butler  37:52 

That’s what I have, tourism and metaphor.

Anne Brannen  37:57 

It’s interesting, because it’s so deeply a part of the language and the history in the Czech Republic. And it’s such a wonderful kind of pictorial event. You can picture it so easily and so it’s got this very strong influence. But no fiction. It shows up in fiction because it’s alluded to, because it’s symbolic, that is so fascinating. I don’t think we’ve come across anything like that.

Michelle Butler  38:28 

Yeah, no, it was very strange. I really thought I was going to find actual historical fiction, but nope, not really. References and cultural presence, and, of course, the fun of the internet liking to pick things up. There is a recurring meme where they have people around a table and the three of them disagree with the one and he gets defenestrated after he irritates them too much. That one shows up quite a lot connected with this. So it’s being used as a kind of shorthand for,  ‘this person has irritated us so much, we’re gonna throw them out the window.’

Anne Brannen  39:13 

If it had happened in England, it would be showing up in Black Adder. So that would be nice. Black Adder would have loved this. So that’s our discussion of the defenestrations of Prague. Yep, we’re done. Next time you hear from us, we’re going to be going to Ireland. Gonna go a little backwards in time to go to Ireland, Ireland 1333, when William de Berg is imprisoned and left to starve. We’ve had some other people in prison and left to starve, but that was in Corfe Castle. So we’ll go back to Ireland. I don’t remember this at all, do you?

Michelle Butler  39:51 

I think I put this on.

Anne Brannen  39:52 

Oh, well, that would be why.

Michelle Butler  39:53 

Yeah, this is another one of those, what comes around, goes around, kind of things. I think I put this on the list because he had done this to other people, and then it was done to him. He had done this to his cousin. This happening to him was direct revenge.

Anne Brannen  40:07 

Okay, all right. Well, this has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. Although in this case, it’s exactly like it is today, with the same technology and probably going on as we speak, over on the other side of this globe. We can be found on Spotify and Apple podcast, and all the places where the podcasts are hanging out. Our website is truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. You can find links to the podcast there and to the show notes and the transcriptions. We get them up as soon as we can, and you can also leave comments for us and get a hold of us. We’d love to hear if you’ve got any suggestions, because the suggestions are great. If you know of crimes in the middle ages that we haven’t covered, you know. If you don’t know if we’ve covered them, we now have an index on the website, and so you can go to the index. It’s up at the top of the page. You can click on index, and everything’s there, so you can find out if your beloved crime is actually on the list already, that we’ve done it. So you’ll hear from us next time. We’ll be in Ireland. Bye

Michelle Butler  41:10 

Bye.

98. April Fool’s Episode: Debunking the Chastity Belt

Anne Brannen  0:25 

Hello, and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I am your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:35 

And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:40 

Today, we are recording our special April Fool’s Day episode. For April Fool’s, we like to talk about things that didn’t really happen. So we had the shame flute last year, I believe that was, and at one point we did droit de seigneur because that never did exist. But today we’re doing chastity belts. We’ve been looking forward to this, haven’t we, Michelle?

Michelle Butler  1:03 

Oh yeah, this is a big one. If you run into people who think they’ve heard something about the Middle Ages, you will constantly run into the chastity belt. I blame Woody Allen, personally.

Anne Brannen  1:17 

Ah, see, I always blame Walter Scott for anything and then find out later if it’s true or not. He’s just my go-to person to blame. But I don’t think he’s to blame for the chastity belts. You’re going to tell us more about that later. Up until fairly recently, the existence of chastity belts wasn’t really questioned. Fairly recently, in the popular imagination. Scholars had different things to say–Michelle is going to tell us all about that. But in the popular imagination, the chastity belts obviously unquestionably existed, especially if there were medieval knights who were going to go on crusade and they had to lock their women up in these chastity belts so that the women would not sleep around. So that’s what they did. For some reason, rather a lot of people just said, ‘oh okay,’ and believed this, even though it basically makes no sense. It’s not just that it didn’t happen. It doesn’t make any damn sense. But there you go. Because, you know, it’s the Middle Ages, and people have been, for a long time, willing to believe pretty much any kind of nonsense about the Middle Ages that they can think up. As, for instance, in the Middle Ages, they used an enormous number of spices so that they could eat rotten meat, which doesn’t really make a lot of sense, does it? Because rotten meat isn’t a thing you eat, is it? We’re all here and people of Europe survived. At any rate, that kind of thing. Chastity belts. They didn’t happen. If you go and you Google ‘chastity belts,’ websites will often be saying things like, they were probably a legend, and then go on to talk about the first users of chastity belts are considered to be the Crusader knights–you know, so they talk about them. They say they probably were a myth, but then they go on to talk about them as if they were not a myth, you know, explaining them to you as if they were actually there. And of course, it makes sense because they were barbaric, weren’t they? A barbaric method of controlling women’s sexuality? Obviously, they did this in the Middle Ages. Obviously. Of course, they would invent this kind of thing. Michelle is going to tell you all about this later. But the professor who wrote the main book that she’s going to be using on the myth of the chastity belts, said, ‘As a medievalist, one day I thought, I cannot stand this anymore.’ So then he went and wrote the book. Thank you, thank you for writing the book. But while the reason we talk about chastity belts now is to say, these probably never existed, and then specify what they weren’t, while we’re talking about what they didn’t do, but what that means is that all the time that we are talking about them not existing, we are visualizing them and reinforcing the Crusader knight and his hapless wife story, because we keep making a picture of it in our collective mind, even when we’re saying they weren’t really there and this is what they weren’t doing. There’s an ‘answer your question’ kind of site that I was looking at that. A user wrote in and questioned how medieval women were able to urinate and defecate whilst wearing the chastity belts. You know, this is one of your first clues that there’s probably something wrong with the entire idea. And the ‘expert’–I’m putting this in quotation marks–‘the expert’ that answers this says that chastity belts had holes in them for those purposes, and then sends this user to Wikipedia, which is going to first call this use of them in the Middle Ages a modern myth, and then explain their use in the Renaissance and how they can be modified, you know, so that you can actually wear them for really short periods of time. In other words, even though we know this is a myth, we keep talking about them as if they had not been a myth. They’re not a myth now. They actually exist, and I’m going to be talking about that later. But we talk about them all the time as if they did, while we say they didn’t. In brief, it’s pretty clear to most people that the chastity belt owned by crusaders was a myth. Certainly, if you Google chastity belts, that’s what you find out, you find out myth, myth, myth, probably not true, myth. But here’s what I’m noting. Again and again, we still like to talk in popular discourse about them as a medieval phenomenon, not as a reality, but as a joke. That’s what they just did. A joke about the Middle Ages. But it’s an obsession for us. It’s an obsession for us that this is how the medieval people thought, especially the Crusaders, because they were like all full of power, you know, and they were doing bad things anyway–they were going trying to try and do things over in a land that really that did not belong to them. But it’s not the Middle Ages that was obsessed with chastity belts.  It’s us. We’re the ones who are obsessed with chastity belts, and we have been really for quite some time. So the medieval chastity belt is another example of the ways in which modern culture projects back out onto the medieval past ideas of barbarity and ignorance that don’t have anything to do with it. The Dark Ages, which is that time in between the fall of Rome and the enlightenment. These are both times of intellectual rigor and logic, and they disappeared, and everybody in the middle of this of this dark age, they believed in magic rather than observable consequences. They were really really mean to each other, unlike the Romans, and the modern people. Because, you know, we never believe stupid things that don’t have any evidence, and we certainly don’t commit atrocities or genocide, do we? Because it’s not the dark ages now–can’t be because we got light. Do I have an attitude about this? Yes, I do.

Michelle Butler  6:58 

Yes, we’re so good now. 

Anne Brannen  6:59 

We’ve got an attitude. Of course none of us would ever lock anybody up in a chastity belt, ha ha, ha, ha ha ha har–except, of course, you know, atrocities, genocide, they exist. They existed then, they exist now. And chastity belts do too, because once having invented them as a medieval phenomenon, we had to construct them. Michelle is going to walk you through the evidence and the scholarly theory. She told me she’s going to do the scholarly theories in some kind of concise manner. I don’t know what that means. Because I know Michelle, and she has a lot of things to say about how people are talking about scholarship. Then I’m going to come back and I’m going to discuss chastity belts nowadays, in case you would like to buy one. Michelle, whatcha ya got?

Michelle Butler  7:47 

I just want to state upfront that there is no debate about this. These things did not exist. We know for certain. There is no ambiguity, there’s no place for argument. I cannot be clear enough about this.

Anne Brannen  8:04 

They did not exist in the Middle Ages.

Michelle Butler  8:06 

It is absolutely not true that when husbands left, even a small percentage of them, in the Middle Ages–

Anne Brannen  8:15 

Even Simon de Montfort.

Michelle Butler  8:20 

There is absolutely not a shred of evidence that a man ever had metal underwear made for his wife, clapped it on her, and then left for months at a time.

Anne Brannen  8:33 

Never.

Michelle Butler  8:34 

And we absolutely know that if somebody had tried that, she would die.

Anne Brannen  8:41 

Yeah, they’re not healthy things.

Michelle Butler  8:43 

She would be dead within two months.

Anne Brannen  8:46 

Oh, is it two months? I didn’t know how long it would be.

Michelle Butler  8:48 

She would be dead because of infection. It’s just not possible to create something like this and not end up with cross contamination. You would have fecal things making their way…you would just die.

Anne Brannen  9:01 

It’s worse made with iron than it would be later with stainless steel. Because iron is gonna rust and stuff–corrode really easily.

Michelle Butler  9:08 

Oh my god. Yeah. No, it’s not cool. And it is intriguing how, as you say, people acknowledge this when they talk about it and then pivot to saying, ‘but here are all the ways that it could have existed.’

Anne Brannen  9:25 

‘And here’s what it looks like if we do and you can buy mine for $150.’

Michelle Butler  9:32 

The scholar that I’m working with here, the book is called The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Mythmaking Process, and that’s important. He’s talking about both why it didn’t exist, and how the myth came into being and why it persists. He is interested in both pieces of this. He’s interested in how this has taken on a life of its own and is so hard to root out.

Anne Brannen  10:00 

I read something that there’s this idea that in the Renaissance, they started padding them. So, you know, that was a little better.

Michelle Butler  10:09 

Here’s what I have for you. I want to tell you where it was published because that matters. It matters that this is a well respected…call it a scholarly book. It’s not some kind of wild thing. The author is Albert Clauson. It is a volume in Palgrave’s The New Middle Ages series, which is edited by Bonnie Wheeler. The book is from 2007.

Anne Brannen  10:33 

So not too long ago.

Michelle Butler  10:35 

No, not too long ago.

Anne Brannen  10:36 

There was one before that in 1931.  The author of that didn’t have as much evidence available.

Michelle Butler  10:42 

Goodness gracious, and cites things that he should know better than to be claiming that they mean what he’s claiming they mean, but that particular book is hugely influential in establishing the myth.

Anne Brannen  10:55 

The one from 1931?

Michelle Butler  10:58 

Yeah, Clauson’s book is kind of like trying to hold back Niagara Falls with a bucket. ‘Stop. Stop.’

Anne Brannen  11:08 

‘No, you’re wrong. Go the other way. Everybody’s fallen off in their barrels.’

Michelle Butler  11:17 

Some of the things that he cites…he explains how the evidence that is usually cited by people claiming that chastity belts existed, he explains what it is and then why it doesn’t mean what they’re claiming it means. 

Anne Brannen  11:33 

Mm hmm.

Michelle Butler  11:34 

For example, in medieval literature, belts are often used as love tokens, or as icons of courtly love. So they have a metaphoric quality to them. One that always shows up as the first example of a reference to chastity belts is Marie de France, in Guigemar. This is the 12th century. What happens in here is that there are these two young lovers. She has a husband, but she doesn’t…it’s always this older husband, young wife thing that people are so anxious about. The young lovers get together. So a) if there was a chastity belt here, it didn’t work. But there isn’t. They get together, but her husband is going to be moving her elsewhere. So they exchange tokens. She ties a special knot in his shirt tail, and he gives her a belt, so that they will be able to recognize each other because they’re expecting to be apart for a while.

Anne Brannen  12:39 

Right. Okay. 

Michelle Butler  12:41 

It gets cited. But it’s not that. It’s just not.

Anne Brannen  12:45 

It’s like just something around her waist. It’s not like, you know, going under her crotch.

Michelle Butler  12:53 

This is absolutely one of my favorite ones. Dietrich von der Glezze’s Der Borte, which is from the 13th century. In this romance–I love this romance–a wife accepts an indecent proposal from a mysterious knight. One night with her and he will give her all of his goods that he has with him. A magical belt, marvelous dogs, and a hunting hawk.

Anne Brannen  13:21 

Oh I want the dogs!

Michelle Butler  13:20 

She really wants these things for her husband. She wants to be able to give him these things to help him advance his knightly career. So she agrees. Unfortunately, a servant sees, and tells the husband who freaks out. He’s all sad and he takes off. The wife waits around two years for him to come back. He doesn’t. So she disguises herself as a man and goes looking for him, wearing the magical belt. She jousts and wins against everybody, including him.

I like this belt.

It’s the magical belt of awesomeness. You wear it and you can’t be defeated. The husband, not recognizing her, befriends her, and is like, you’ve got the best stuff. Can I buy some of this stuff from you? She’s like, ‘yes, but I have a condition’ and she offers him the same bargain that she agreed to, to get the things from the knight. But of course, she’s dressed as a man. This happens a lot in medieval literature, they’re kind of flirting with this homoerotic tension. He agrees. Of course he does. She reveals herself, and I’m sure there’s an awkward conversation.

Anne Brannen  14:49 

Oh, probably not because it’s medieval literature. Probably it goes like this. ‘Oh, there you are. How glad I am to find you.’ ‘Yes, I too.’

Michelle Butler  14:57 

So this also, while an awesome wonderful story, is not having anything to do with the chastity belt. This is an awesome belt of magical-ness that allows you to not be defeated. It’s exactly the same as what shows up in Arthurian texts, where Arthur has Excalibur and the sheath.

Anne Brannen  15:18 

Why would you think it was a chastity belt? That doesn’t make any sense. There’s nothing in there that says ‘ah this must be a chastity belt.’

Michelle Butler  15:28 

I agree with you. But apparently people went looking for anywhere that the word ‘belt’ shows up in medieval literature and went ‘Aha.’

Anne Brannen  15:36 

I see.

Michelle Butler  15:37 

This is actually really common in medieval–typically from the 12th century on–in romances, that you have belts, as  tokens of affection. This is not a huge leap, because it is down around your waist. It’s a way of talking about your body and talking about the body without being too explicit. But it’s not a chastity belt. It’s a way of talking about attraction and talking about desire without being overly explicit. The same thing happens with keys.

Anne Brannen  16:20 

Because the chastity belts supposedly have to have a key, so that you can get in and out of them. And the knight has the key, whch he take to the Holy Land and then does not lose while he is storming the walls of Jerusalem. Amazing story. Amazing.

Michelle Butler  16:39 

There’s a whole lot of poems and stories and romances in which keys are also used as metaphors for attraction and desire. And, frequently, consummation. This is a fairly obvious analogy. It’s the same sort of thinking that gives us The Romance of the Rose, where you have the secret garden. But reading it later, wanting to find…the chastity belt thing is a good example of you find what you’re looking for.

Anne Brannen  17:19 

You know it’s there, and so you interpret everything that you see as being it.

Michelle Butler  17:22 

Yes. So you have things like–I’m gonna open up the book and turn to one of these…I don’t think I need to give you all of these, because there are a whole bunch of them.

Anne Brannen  17:31 

Give us your faves.

Michelle Butler  17:33 

There are a number of these. So, for example, this: ‘You are mine, I am yours, you can be certain of that. You are locked up in my heart. Lost is the little key. You have to stay therein forever.’ This is not a chastity belt. This is the analogy of the heart being a lock and the key, and sometimes they’re more explicitly an analogy for sex, obviously. But it’s not anything to do with chastity belts, despite having been cited many times. The first source for something that is actually the concept of a chastity belt–so here we are, yay–is Conrad Kaiser’s Bella Fortis, which is from 1405. It is a late medieval handbook of military technology.

Anne Brannen  18:22 

Uh huh. And chastity belts are surely important to this. Oh, yeah. Because crusades, obviously.

Michelle Butler  18:28 

The thing is, it’s like a medieval travel narrative in that you have things that are real and things that are fantastical in here. Part of the fun for the original audience is that they know which is which.

Anne Brannen  18:41 

So if they’re reading a travel narrative, they actually know that probably there’s not people in a different distant country that go around with their feet on their head?

Michelle Butler  18:49 

Yes.

Anne Brannen  18:53 

Fair enough.

Michelle Butler  18:55 

This is the earliest illustration of a chastity belt. There is a picture. It’s attributed to the Florentines, which is an interesting piece of the development of the concept of the chastity belt. It’s like the droit de seigneur in that nobody is saying we do this here. They’re saying those people over there did this.

Anne Brannen  19:14 

Right. Right, right, right, right. Much as we do with the Middle Ages.

Michelle Butler  19:17 

Yes. The Germans say the Italians invented this. The Italians say the Syrians invented this. Everybody is pointing over there. I’m gonna quote a little bit here for you. “Typical for his time, Kaiser enjoyed projecting a kind of aura surrounding his work, which includes a number of highly fanciful objects, recipes for magical operations, making a person invisible or invulnerable, and he added several comical comments and images of obviously dreamed up gadgets. For instance, the explanation concerning the floating belt emphasizes that the best method to inflate this belt would be to utilize the wind coming from behind.”  I.e., farts. So, the chastity belt that he gives a loving illustration of is in no way, the only thing in here that is fanciful. There’s a whole bunch of them, including a castration machine.

Anne Brannen  20:14 

Uh huh. Why do you need a castration machine? Is it for your enemies when you get them?

Michelle Butler  20:19 

It doesn’t necessarily explain why you would use one. It just explains how it would work.

Anne Brannen  20:28 

In case you needed it. Okay, fair enough.

Michelle Butler  20:34 

The thing is, it is absolutely positively the case that this chastity belt, which he gives in detail is a joke. It has no openings.

Anne Brannen  20:45 

So it’s even worse than the ones we’ve imagined.

Michelle Butler  20:55 

Yes. Indeed. So this one is one in which, again, if you’re just going and reading something out of context, it looks like it’s meaningful. But when you put it back in its context you realize you’re dealing with…you know, pieces of this are in fact, realistic warfare. And then you have these other ones that are joke machines, like the castration machine. I find it fascinating that nobody cites the castration machine as a real thing that existed.

Anne Brannen  21:24 

Oh, that’s lovely, isn’t it?

Michelle Butler  21:25 

Even though this description is pretty detailed. “Take this tearing instrument made of strong leather tightly into your hand, whereas the iron hook is to be put around the well known body parts so that it fits well on it, then tightly wrap the middle belt around your arm and pull as hard as you can. Pay attention to place your foot against the foot of the man who is to be castrated. His testicles will come off immediately.” So it’s very, very detailed.

Anne Brannen  21:54 

Yes it is, and it’s really silly and it’s never going to be useful.

Michelle Butler  21:57 

And it’s thinking through, like, if you were actually going to do this, how would you do it? But it’s not real. And nobody cites it as real. That says a lot about us.

Anne Brannen  22:08 

Yeah. Chastity belts, obviously real. Castration machines, oh, of course not. That makes sense.

Michelle Butler  22:14 

In a similar time period, the monk and humanist Rutger von Sponheim is giving a report about Benedictine abbot and historian Johannes Trithemius, who is also known for his account of Faustus, which is interesting. Sponheim is quoting the other historian. So again, we have this, you know, friend of a friend. He describes a male chastity belt used to punish monks and priests who are caught having sex with women. This also does not get cited as if it were real. Isn’t that interesting? It’s also described in detail, but it’s not real.

Anne Brannen  22:16 

‘It’s not real but let’s talk about it as if it was.’

Michelle Butler  23:05 

I have never once run into anything that claims that the castration machine or the male chastity belt is real. Not once. In fact, I had never heard of either one of those before. In the 15th and 16th century, in literature, chastity belts start showing up as satire. Not very often, but as an offshoot of existing literary themes of jealous husbands and anxiety about impotent old men trying and failing to control young wives. It doesn’t show up real often. But there are a couple. One is, Sercambi’s collection of novellas. I think we actually have run into this guy before. I think we cited one of the novellas when we were talking about the sumptuary laws, and he had a very, very tongue in cheek discussion of why the sumptuary laws don’t work, that the people trying to enforce them go up to a woman on the street and say, ‘Why are you wearing that?’ And she’s like, ‘that’s not that, that’s this other thing’ and tells him it’s a made up animal. So it’s very easy to subvert them. Well, in one of his stories he tells–and this is fictional, it’s very clearly fictional, all the readers know that it’s fiction, but it’s a satire–the Venetian textile maker, Marco de Castillo has lots and lots and lots of relationships with wives before he himself marries. This is important. Once he marries, he realizes he could be on the other end of this now, and he has a chastity belt made and puts it on his wife. Okay. But she dies.

Anne Brannen  24:58 

Does the chastity belt kill her?

Michelle Butler  25:01 

Yes. She dies from wearing it.

Anne Brannen  25:05 

There you are. It’s an actual real one then.

Michelle Butler  25:07 

Sercambi thought this through. He remarries. The second wife’s parents were like, ‘What are you doing? He killed the first wife with one.’  She is like, ‘I got a plan. Don’t worry.’ She arranges A) to have a friend there with her, and B) to be standing in front of a window. When he’s trying to put this on her–she said she’s going to agree to it–but when he actually tries to do it, she motions to her friend, he may actually be a boyfriend, and the two of them throw the husband out the window.

Anne Brannen  25:38 

Oh, that makes sense.

Michelle Butler  25:40 

He died. The thing is, everybody agrees that he deserved it.

Anne Brannen  25:49 

Yeah, I’m not sorry.

Michelle Butler  25:51 

Here’s a quote:  “Marco is condemned as a sadistic, jealous, and foolish husband who deserved to die.” His stuff goes to the second wife, the second wife and the lover leave town and live comfortably elsewhere, and the second wife’s parents manage the property. So the moral of the story is, that was a dumb idea and you deserve what happened to you. Then he cites a couple of 15th century ones that actually people haven’t found and don’t cite. He gives us these examples, but these next two are not cited by people wanting to argue that the chastity belt existed, probably because they’re obviously dumb. They’re so obviously satire, or they just didn’t find it. Who knows. One is by an author named Antonio Cornazano from 1484. This husband in this story, of course, has a young wife, and he’s a merchant, so he has to travel a lot. This is the one that says these things were invented in Syria, because of course this is an Italian author. So he has this great idea that because he has to travel all the time, he’s going to commission a chastity belt. He’s heard of these things. The young wife says to him, ‘there’s just one problem. You’re going away for months, and I’m pregnant. How am I supposed to have this baby?’

Anne Brannen  27:33 

Good point.

Michelle Butler  27:34 

He says, ‘Oh, you’re right.’ So what he does, is he puts a belt on her and then hangs a cross, so it will be hanging down in front. He thinks that this will be a solution. Because any good Christian man who was thinking about committing adultery with her would totally stop.

Anne Brannen  28:04 

Obviously.

Michelle Butler  28:06 

Obviously.

Anne Brannen  28:08 

Nobody ever murders anybody in a church, either.

Michelle Butler  28:11 

He goes off on his trip, and he explains to the other people on the ship with him, his fellow travelers, what he’s done, and his friends tell him, that’s not going to work. The quote from the story is, “we would all of us pass through the cross to wait upon the Madonna.” He has to hurry home because he’s like, I’ve made it worse, that makes people more likely. He has to rush home, and then he has to give up and just decide, I’m just gonna have to trust my wife.

Anne Brannen  28:53 

What a concept.

Michelle Butler  28:56 

This one is great. It’s making fun of the ludicrousness of this. He’s a dolt. Then there’s a medieval Welsh–

Anne Brannen  29:07 

Oh is there really?

Michelle Butler  29:09 

There totally is. This is written by Hywel.

Anne Brannen  29:15 

Howell.

Michelle Butler  29:15 

Hywel of Bulth and it is a parody of a request poem. This one is very interesting. A young man asks a blacksmith to make a chastity belt, that he is going to somehow put on a girl that he’s courting because there’s a second suitor. So this one is very interesting, because he actually isn’t this girl’s boyfriend. He’s not an accepted suitor. He’s not a husband. It’s very interested in the violence of it. It’s also a way to describe her body in a way that is supposedly allowable. But it’s not about love. It’s not about jealousy. It’s about competition with that other man. The story is not endorsing this. According to our author, “what we can prove is that male fantasy”– I’m quoting now–“male fantasy was certainly occupied with the idea of the chastity belt at least since the 15th century.” We can prove that.

Anne Brannen  29:22 

Yes. That existed.

Michelle Butler  30:28 

We cannot prove that they ever actually existed. We can prove that they occupy a space in the imagination. That’s interesting, because that is exactly like droit de seigneur. The late Middle Ages invents this concept, and then freaks out about it.

Anne Brannen  30:49 

The droit de seigneur, we have to explain that just in case anybody’s listening who isn’t familiar with it.

Michelle Butler  30:53 

That was what we did for April Fool’s two years ago. Last year, we did the shame flute–also doesn’t exist. Droit de seigneur, you start seeing in the late 15th century, laws being passed outlawing it. So there’s knowledge of it as a concept–that is the idea that the lord has the right to sleep with a woman on her wedding night, he gets the first night, the lord’s night. But there’s no evidence that this was ever actually a real thing. But there is evidence that there was anxiety about it towards the late Middle Ages. There’s a specific Duke of Padua, Francesco the second. He’s a 14th century duke. He is the last independent ruler of Padua. He often–often, frequently, all over the place–gets cited as the inventor of the chastity belt.

Anne Brannen  31:23 

Really.

Michelle Butler  31:24 

This often happens when you’re trying to make things sound more credible that are actually bunk.  You give more specific detail, trying to make it into a…because if this was a real thing, first of all, if it was a real thing that they were using in the Crusades, this late 14th, early 15th century, duke of Padua is not going to be the inventor of it, he’s 200 years too late. But you can make bunk things sound more real by attaching this person. He did actually exist. He was a real person. And he was really executed by the Venetians. But he wasn’t executed because he treated the women in his life so badly and slapped chastity belts on his wife and all of his concubines, which is what later people claim.

Anne Brannen  32:39 

It’s also a really good use of a concessive argument. You know, ‘it is true that these did not exist in the early Middle Ages, but…’

Michelle Butler  32:48 

‘We all know about the sex drives of the Italians, we’re not even surprised that they have to slap these things on their women.’  The amount of ethnic bias that is involved in this is interesting.

Anne Brannen  33:01 

Nobody ever says the English made it up, did they?

Michelle Butler  33:03 

No, it never gets attributed to the English. It gets attributed to the Italians. It’s like what a French kiss is called in other places. It’s called other things. Or how the English referred to STDs as the French disease. It’s those people over there. They’re the horny ones. It’s not us. My author goes through all of the contemporary chronicles, and of course, there is no contemporary evidence that Francesco had anything to do, that he was either a pervert or did terrible things to his wives. There’s just no evidence for it. There’s no evidence, but he’s still cited as the inventor of the chastity belt. Because what happens is that people start citing each other. I found the same thing with the shame flute. People are pointing at each other and not a real kind of source. That happens before the internet as well. It’s a thing that we find on the internet. But most of the development of the myth of the chastity belt happens well before the internet’s a thing, and it still is this shallow pool of sources that cite each other. 

Anne Brannen  34:18 

The internet made it easier and quicker.

Michelle Butler  34:21 

Classen points out, while conceding that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, if chastity belts existed, would Chaucer have been able to resist mentioning them?

Anne Brannen  34:36 

Chaucer would have had to talk about him. There would have been a whole story.

Michelle Butler  34:42 

Oh my god. It would have shown up. If it was a real thing, it would have been in the Canterbury Tales, and it absolutely would have been in the one with Nicholas and…

Anne Brannen  34:53 

Miller’s Tale.

Michelle Butler  34:55 

The Millers Tale. I mean, it’s right there.

Anne Brannen  34:58 

It’s right there. The Wife of Bath might have been interested in it too.

Michelle Butler  34:59 

But it’s not there. With the caveat that that is not a conclusive argument, it’s certainly a suggestive one. All of the silence from Chaucer, from Boccaccio, from people who you really would have expected to mention it if it was a thing floating around, a real thing floating around. He hilariously tells us that “certainly the most pornographic collection of late medieval poems in Latin composed by Antoni0 Beccadelli, known under his sobriquet ‘Antonio Panormita'” has absolutely no mention of a chastity belt. So this is 15th century erotic poems and the only time it mentions a key is when you have a husband trying to make sure that his wine cellar is kept safe. It’s, again, one of these places he’s citing like, this would have been low hanging fruit for this guy, if it existed. It barely shows up in 18th century erotic images, which I thought is interesting. Okay, so where the heck did this myth come from? Uh huh. It comes from a couple of things. There is a misunderstanding by later scholars of allegorical and metaphorical uses. There is a piece in the Bible where Paul talks about putting on the full armor of God–the breastplate of righteousness, etc–and that gets amplified by medieval theologians. There is, in some of these places, a discussion of the girdle of chastity. It’s a metaphor. But this is one of the ways in which, as you and I have always talked about, that you can’t understand medieval literature without also being a historian. It really doesn’t make sense to be a medieval literature scholar without also being a historian, because if you can’t put things in context, you can’t make sense of them. This is a exemplar of that. If you’re not aware of how that’s being used as an extended metaphor, it really really looks like they’re saying…the girdle of chastity sounds like a straightforward thing. The kind of chivalric poetry that we talked about earlier with Marie de France, etc.–the use of the belt as a romantic item is everywhere. It’s in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It’s all over the place. It’s in the Nibelungenlied. It’s everywhere. But it’s not an actual thing. Well, it is a thing, but it’s not a chastity belt. It’s being used as a metaphor for the romance in the relationship. Then we had the social satire, in the late Middle Ages–people are saying, well, what if it actually existed? Well, you would look dumb, is was what would happen, you would look stupid, and you would deserve it. Another cause: from the Enlightenment on, you have profound bias about the past.

Particular pasts. Because they liked the Romans and the Greeks.

Yes, the assumption is that the medieval is barbarous, and the people who ended up inventing and then perpetuating the myth, they’re not medievalists, they’re not experts in the field. They are anthropologists, or ethnologists, or people who are trying to write about the history of sexuality. Even 20th century feminist scholarship has inadvertently perpetuated this myth because it comes into it with a set of assumptions and then finds things to support those assumptions. Another thing that happens, though, is that if you’re an anthropologist, or if you’re somebody trying to write the history of sexual practice, there are actually practices attempting to control sexuality that did and do exist.

Anne Brannen  39:32 

Sure.

Michelle Butler  39:32 

Female genital mutilation. Castration. Infibullation. That is fascinating. Infibullation is hard. It’s hard to understand whether and how much that might have existed. There are places where it’s described as somebody has punched a hole through the labia on both sides and stuck a padlock through it. I have my doubts about that. That that ever happened. But there does seem to be some evidence that male slaves were sometimes…infibullation was practiced on them by puncturing the foreskin and soldering a ring in there. Certainly masturbation devices existed. One of the things that we know for certain is that more than one of the devices that are supposedly chastity belts are actually 19th century masturbation devices. 19th century America loses its mind over masturbation.

Anne Brannen  40:31 

This continues for quite some time.

Michelle Butler  40:33 

Lordy pie. Circumcision becomes popular in the US because there is a belief that it will keep boys from masturbating.

Anne Brannen  40:43 

The thing is, masturbation makes you insane. Also, there’s some moral thing to it.

Michelle Butler  40:48 

I have a little bit more sympathy for scholars, who come in with this context, misunderstanding chastity belts, because they kind of fit in things that are known to have existed. But what’s truly, truly worrisome, from my point of view, is how difficult/impossible it’s turning out to be to dislodge this myth. He cites examples from 1997, 1998, and 2004, where it’s being repeated as fact–

Anne Brannen  41:20 

That’s amazing.

Michelle Butler  41:21 

That they existed. We should know better by now. But one of the points he’s making–why the book is called a myth making process–is that once these things get established, it’s very, very difficult to provide a corrective.

Anne Brannen  41:34 

The picture is just too clear and too satisfying.

Michelle Butler  41:38 

It’s like the shame flute in that people have created fake objects that then supposedly demonstrate that these things existed.

Anne Brannen  41:48 

Yup. You can go to the museums and see them still. A lot of them have been taken out. But some of them have been left there with little cards saying ‘probably not existing.’

Michelle Butler  41:57 

Really, one of the lessons to take from this is if you’re in Europe and you see a sign for a Medieval Torture Museum, don’t bother. Practically everything you’re gonna see is…you’re learning a lot about the 19th century and not so much about the Middle Ages.

Anne Brannen  42:12 

They can be fun though. If you want to go have fun, then you can do that. But if you want to go learn about the Middle Ages, they are no use to you.

Michelle Butler  42:18 

Because its a lot more about the 19th century’s neuroses than the medieval. So that is what I have. We have this disturbing myth that has become deeply, deeply embedded in our culture. Go team.

Anne Brannen  42:34 

A lovely myth. And it’s such a lovely myth that we have to keep repeating it. And now we need to be able to purchase these things. So I will explain chastity belts nowadays, what’s going on. I was going to talk about the chastity belts and chastity devices that were to help you if you were having a problem with masturbation in the 19th century and on. That’s how long this stuff lasted. You could buy them. You didn’t wear them for long periods of time. So therefore, you didn’t actually die from them. They’re not going to kill you from sepsis. But you could buy these things, of different sorts, up until about just before World War Two.

Michelle Butler  43:10 

I didn’t know that it was that late. I think of those as being 19th century items. So that’s really interesting.

Anne Brannen  43:16 

Yes, it is. Yes, it is. I hope I found some more stuff that you don’t know about too. We’ll see. I tried, God knows I tried. So chastity belts nowadays. As I said earlier, in the 19th century–this continued about to the Second World War–you could buy various contraptions for women and for men to save you from masturbation. These days, you can buy display chastity belts, ones that are supposed to look like medieval chastity belts. To buy these things, you need to go to like the stores and the online stores and companies that are making replicas of medieval swords or chainmail or dresses or something. You can sometimes buy fake medieval chastity belts for display for about $150. You can get one that you can display or you can wear it, although it doesn’t have a lock. So you know, it’s just for show. But the high majority of chastity belts these days are sold not for display as fake artifacts but as sex toys. That’s mostly what they’re being sold for. If you go to Amazon to look for chastity belts–and I want to tell you that it is only my dedication to True Crime Medievaland to fully knowing things and to telling true things–that has caused me to go to Amazon and type in ‘chastity belts’ because now for a while this is all going to show up on, you know that, little place ‘related to things you have searched for’ or things you are interested in or have viewed. So along with Ukrainian embroidery and the parrot stands and the dog treats and the women with ADHD books, there’s going to be examples of chastity belts. This is gonna go on for a while. I did this for you. I did this for y’all. Just saying.

Michelle Butler  44:56 

Yeah, I’m not gonna do that.

Anne Brannen  44:57 

Don’t do that. Although I must say it was very interesting. Most of the devices that show up there are for men. So they’re chastity cages–

Michelle Butler  45:07 

Whoa, plot twist.

Anne Brannen  45:08 

Have I got plot twists for you. So the straps needed to keep them on, they can be leather. The cages are, the metal is stainless steel, which doesn’t corrode like iron does. You could also use various kinds of plastics, including silicone. So one of the ways in which technology has made such devices much safer. Yay, yay. One of the varieties of the chastity cage that I saw is made out of stainless steel mesh, and it really looks a lot like chainmail, which I think is quite nice. I think that’s a good move. That only runs for about $50, which seems to me to be a bargain. Then there’s some that you can have a little slight, not giant, electric shocks. So there’ll be like–

Michelle Butler  45:57 

Wait, wait, wait. Do you do that to yourself? Or is your…so I guess one of the questions I have about these is, is this something that you’re buying for yourself? Or are you playing with this with a partner? What’s the…?

Anne Brannen  46:10 

Both.

Michelle Butler  46:11 

Huh. Interesting.

Anne Brannen  46:13 

You can do either one. It really would depend on what your particular desire was, and how it worked. I saw one, it’s mostly silicon, and then there’s some bits of metal obviously, which you need for the electric shocks. That’s running about $60. The ones for women are leather and silicon mostly and there’ll be little metal parts because you need like the locks and you know, buckles and stuff. Now, one of them, there’s one of the women chastity belts, it’s only about $10. It’s a real bargain. It says that the contraption of leather and metal chains is the ‘ultimate in seduction’, and so the opposite of what chastity belts were doing. Isn’t that lovely? This chastity belt will get you excited, rather than, you know, keeping you from masturbating or keeping you from doing anything while the knight is gone. I just love the way this has completely shifted. There’s this change in the whole meaning, and not just the purpose of, the whole meaning of chastity belts. Anyway. It has an ergonomic design, which they say is ‘delicate, refreshing and breathable.’ So it’s really you know, it’s not going to cause you health problems. They don’t say how long you can wear it but apparently it is not going to kill you. So that’s nice.

It’s still called a chastity belt but you’re wearing it for arousal?

Yes.

Michelle Butler  47:31 

Fascinating.

Anne Brannen  47:32 

Yes. And the chastity cages–that’s what they’re called–

Michelle Butler  47:35 

Wow.

Anne Brannen  47:35 

There’s an idea in there still of a boundary, someplace that one cannot go until allowed to or until one goes over the boundary there’s still some idea of containment of something. It just works differently.

Michelle Butler  47:53 

Fascinating.

Anne Brannen  47:55 

I love the humans. They’re too much. On a side note, because I was finding all this stuff and it was really affordable, and I thought ‘well, how expensive does this get?’ You know you can change on Amazon, do like how many stars, you know, customer reviews or like do this low price to high. So I did high price to low, and the one that I found that was the most expensive is about $900. 

Michelle Butler  48:14 

Aaaa!

Anne Brannen  48:15 

Why is this so expensive? I’m not really sure. It has a lot of accoutrement, I will tell you, because you can have these things that do more…you can have these devices that do way more than just one thing. They can have multi purposes which I myself personally will not go into but I think you can all imagine. So the belt part is silicone and it says you can wear it a really long time. That’s interesting to me because one of the problems with the older chastity belts that didn’t exist would have been that you would have died from them had you worn them for a long time which you didn’t because they weren’t there but you would have. But at any rate, you can wear it a long time. Also you can get it in pink or black or blue, and you can get custom sizes. So anyway I think that’s why it’s 900 bucks. Yes. There’s another wrinkle to all this because there’s such a thing as anti-rape chastity belts.

Michelle Butler  49:09 

Oh.

Anne Brannen  49:10 

The is company is AR Aware and they just had a GoFundMe sort of thing, they had a community funding thing, and they got enough money. They haven’t started selling them yet but apparently they’re going to be. What they’re making is boy shorts for women that lock and they’re made out of uncuttable but comfortable material. They have an informative video online. If you want to look them up, you can go see this video. I really did a lot of research. I’m just telling you.

Michelle Butler  49:35 

We kind of switched roles for this one.

Anne Brannen  49:38 

I know! I know, I was really happy about this.

Michelle Butler  49:41 

You went off and did the rabbit hole.

Anne Brannen  49:42 

I did not do a rabbit hole. This was my topic. Nothing side here. I’m on it. Anyway, it explains everything. You can’t purchase them yet, but there’s a lot of controversy about them already because to wear these means that women are in charge of not getting raped rather than focusing on rapists. Why don’t you just not do that, you dumb asses. It skews the power issues. So that is very interesting to me but they haven’t happened yet. But there’s really there’s a lot of controversy.

Michelle Butler  50:13 

That is interesting because some of the people that Claussen cites float the idea that maybe these things existed but women wore them when they were traveling, as protection. They float the idea that maybe they were anti-rape devices. You know, I did forget to mention one thing that is quite hilarious. There was a grave discovered in 1899–

Anne Brannen  50:43 

I remember this.

Michelle Butler  50:46 

Were you…?

Anne Brannen  50:46 

You tell the story

Michelle Butler  50:47 

Okay.

Anne Brannen  50:48 

It wasn’t on my list. You tell it.

Michelle Butler  50:50 

I forgot to mention it. But it’s worth mentioning because it is supposedly archaeological evidence for chastity belts. They decide that she probably was buried in the 16th century. But pieces of this grave have disappeared, so this is why this is complicated. Things got lost in the First World War. But it’s discovered in 1899, and the woman has a metal device on–

Anne Brannen  51:18 

Metal and leather.

Michelle Butler  51:22 

Yeah. Its on her hips. And they go, oh my gosh, here we go, it’s actual archaeological evidence of a woman who was killed by a chastity belt. The thing is, later, people have looked at this thing and decided that it’s probably actually a surgical device. She seems to have fallen and broken her hip, and it’s an attempt to save her. It obviously didn’t work. But it was an attempt to deal with a broken hip in the 17th century.

Anne Brannen  52:03 

Thank you for adding that.

Michelle Butler  52:05 

A for effort, F for confusing later people who were desperately looking for evidence of naughty things.

Anne Brannen  52:13 

When chastity belts show up in the news, sometimes things have gone really wrong. Like somebody locked a chastity belt onto the Biloxi Bridge and everybody got upset about that. This is really disgusting and tacky. Or sometimes you know, somebody will be going through the airport security and beep, beep, beep because you are showing up on the X ray with your chastity belt. It’s no good. But what I’m gonna leave you with–Michelle had found this first, but I’m going to tell you about this. I’ll leave you with the last bit of information on ransomware chastity belts. In January of 2021, a Bluetooth enabled sex toy got hacked. It was a chastity device that was controlled through Bluetooth for locking or unlocking, so someone else from afar could lock and unlock things. And the hacker did. The hacker locked them, didn’t they? It had a companion app, and earlier in October of 2020–more than a year before–researchers had discovered that it was vulnerable to attack because it didn’t require authentication. The cyber attacker would lock the devices and then require about $700-$750 worth of bitcoin to get your genitals unlocked. Some people–this is one of my favorite parts–some people, it happened to them several times. Meaning that they didn’t stop once or even twice. God love them. You couldn’t cut these things off. You would need an angle grinder and your private parts would be in danger. So that wasn’t any good. You could unlock it with a screwdriver. But that would void the warranty and you didn’t want that, did you, but you could get ahold of support and support would unlock and reset it from afar and nobody actually paid the ransom. So everybody got out of it. And the company then did fix the problem. So that’s very nice. And you want to know about that now because if you’re going to buy any of these company’s products, you want to know that they fixed the problem and that from afar, your toys, your electronic toys that you’re wearing on your genitals, are not going to get hacked. Now, the newer versions, you know, the updated versions of…oh, it’s called the Cellmate, by the way, this device. It’s about $150. They have other Bluetooth controled devices too, that do other things, many other things actually, and they’re all controlled by bluetooth and you can get them. So there you are. Chastity belts did not exist in the Middle Ages. We invented them and we said the Middle Ages invented them, and we use them for other purposes than the ones we said they had been invented for. And then because we could, we hooked them up to the internet. The end.

Michelle Butler  55:13 

I’m totally, totally shocked to discover that the same culture that has a reality show called ‘Sex sent Me to the ER’, that we’re actually responsible for chastity belts. I have seen this show with my mom.

Anne Brannen  55:28 

Your mom watches ‘Sex sent Me to the ER’?

Michelle Butler  55:31 

She did. I don’t know that she does now. Now she’s really strongly into a cowboy phase. But she did watch ‘Sex sent Me to the ER.’  The people in them. I mean, can you imagine not only doing the dumb thing that you sent to the ER, but then agreeing to talk about it on television and reenact pieces of it?

Anne Brannen  55:50 

That’s the line for me. I totally understand doing a stupid thing and having to go to the ER. Putting it on reality television…I don’t understand.

Michelle Butler  55:52 

Some of these things…you know, two and a half seconds of thought, like the one guy who decided to propose by putting the ring around his dick.

Anne Brannen  56:08 

Oh that’s not a good idea.

Michelle Butler  56:10 

Not a good idea.

Anne Brannen  56:12 

Fingers are too small to make that work for long.

Michelle Butler  56:17 

He got aroused. And then it was stuck.

Anne Brannen  56:19 

It was stuck.

Michelle Butler  56:20 

Oh, my God, they had to call the firefighters in with a bolt cutter. And there was anxiety all around.

Anne Brannen  56:28 

I would think so. I’m having anxiety just hearing about and I don’t even have those parts.

Michelle Butler  56:34 

Holy smokes. I mean, we are so dumb, but this is who we are.

Anne Brannen  56:38 

This is who we are. The next time that you hear from us, we actually will be talking about something that did happen, although it’s really almost as unbelievable. One of Henry the first daughters tried to kill him with a crossbow. So this has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today only with less technology. You can find us on Spotify and Apple podcast and all the places where the podcasts are hanging out. You can go to true crime medieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. There are links to the podcast there and also the show notes and the transcriptions, which we get up onto the site as soon as we can. You can leave comments and you can get a hold of us there. Those are all the things that we have to say today, I’m pretty sure. You got anything else to say, Michelle?

Michelle Butler  57:33 

Nope, that’s it. Go off and tell your friends that chastity belts did not exist.

Anne Brannen  57:38 

But you can buy them on Amazon.

Michelle Butler  57:42 

We have invented them because of who we are. But medieval people did not have them because of who they were.

Anne Brannen  57:53 

Yeah. Bye.

Michelle Butler  57:53 

Bye.

95. Henry d’Almain is Murdered, Viterbo, Italy 1271

Anne Brannen  0:24 

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:33 

And I’m Michelle Butler, in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:36 

Today we are going to talk about a really, really stupid bad crime, that was just stupid and bad and dumb. So that’s what we’re going to talk about and it was awful. We’re going to Viterbo, Italy in 1271, where Henry de Almain was murdered by Guy and Simon de Montfort–Simon de Montfort the younger–who were his cousins, the sons of Simon de Montfort, in retaliation for their father having been killed and mutilated at the Battle of Eversham, a battle that Henry hadn’t been at. What the hell. Here’s our background. That battle had been in the Second Barons war. The First Barons war lasted from 1215 to 1217, and in it, some barons rebelled against King John at that time because he wasn’t abiding by what he had said he would abide by in the Magna Carta, which had been signed in 1215. The signing of the Magna Carta had come after rebellions against John’s taxes, which had been grievous, on account of John had been busy trying to get the Angevin lands back from King Phillip the second of France and he kept losing. So then he needed more money because he had to pay things like ransoms and fees, and ‘I’m sorry’ money, the kinds of thing that you have to pay after war if you don’t win it. Also, John was just horrible. I mean, we often say this, that he wasn’t a good king, he wasn’t a good man. That’s just how it was. One of the things he believed with that was that kings were above the law, which is one of the reasons Magna Carta got invented at all.  It was like, ‘no, you also have to abide by some principles.’ So that was the First Barons war. John died of dysentery in 1216–the First Barons war wasn’t over yet–and his nine year old son, who was Henry, became king. But really, of course, his regent was running things. That was William Marshal, who shows up in our podcasts quite often. William Marshal, here he is, Michelle, back again.

Michelle Butler  2:48 

Yay.

Anne Brannen  2:51 

Very quickly, a revived Magna Carta was reissued and signed. So that reinforced some of the baronial support for the English monarchy. That was important because the French, led by Philip’s son Louie had been being defeated on English territory, including the Battle of Sandwich, where Eustace the pirate monk was killed. We have a podcast about Eustace the pirate monk. So the First Barons war ended in 1217. Got a new Magna Carta, got the French off English territory, although the English aren’t completely off French territory, but there you are. France agreed that France was not the ruler of England. The barons said they were sorry. The French told the Scots and the Welsh that they shouldn’t fight the English anymore, like that does any good. ‘Oh, the French say that we shouldn’t go over the border and whack the English.’ That’s what the French said. Because, you know, they’d been using them as allies. William Marshal saved the royal day, and so that’s great. So that’s the First Barons war, where the barons rebelled against John. The Second Barons war, which is the one which we’re more concerned with, was when the barons fought his son–this would be King Henry the third–who had been nine during the first one but now was all grown up and his regent had done so well in bringing the First Barons war to a close. So Henry grew up and the reasons for the Second Barons war were much the same. There was hard taxing–the barons also didn’t like Henry–and also there was a famine and that didn’t make things any better. This war lasted 1264 to 1267, so three years. Neither one of them are really long wars. They’re not like the Cousins War, which most people call the War of the Roses. They’re not like the Cousins War, which really went on for a long, long time. Long, long, long, long time. Long time. Long time. We have several generations. This was just like ‘on, on, on’ and then, you know, you sign something. The barons were led in the Second Barons war by Simon de Montfort–Simon de Montfort, senior, not junior, who was going to be misbehaving later. Simon de Montfort wanted the king to rule with the barons, with a council of the barons, rather than just a few guys that the king likes, which had really been…you know, ‘who are the counselors?’ ‘Oh, some guys I picked who are my best buddies.’ Simon  de Montfort wanted a representative council. He’d been in France. In fact, he was born in France. He had, when young, been a leader of the Albigensian crusade–we have a podcast on that too– where the French slaughtered the Cathars of the Occitan because they were the wrong sort of Christians. He gave up his lands in France and he kept his lands in England, and by 1236, he was one of Henry the third’s favorites, and he became the Earl of Leicester. In 1238, he married the king’s sister Eleanor, who was the widow of William Marshal. Da-ta-da! Billy Marshal back again. They’re all related. They’re all related. Everybody’s married to everybody’s family. So this is the widow of  William Marshal. She was 16 when William Marshal died, and she swore a vow of chastity–she was never going to marry again. She broke this vow a year later, when she married Simon de Montfort. The Archbishop condemned the marriage and the barons were all pissed off because Simon wasn’t of high rank and he was French and, you know, the princess of England had married him and this was bad. Richard of Cornwall, who was Eleanor and Henry’s brother, rebelled and had to be bought off. So there wasn’t a really good reaction to this wedding. But Simon and Eleanor named their first son Henry, and Henry named Simon as one of the godfathers when Prince Edward was born. So things were okay for a little while–a little while–and then they fell apart. Because Simon owed one of Eleanor’s uncles some money, and he named Henry, King Henry, as his security. The king flipped right out and said some very bad things, and also said that he was going to imprison Simon in the tower. So Simon and Eleanor went to France. Then Simon went on crusade. I forgot to mention that during his time in England, he had also thrown the Jews out of Lincoln. He was that sort of person. At any rate, he went on crusade. These things are related. People who are not Christians, and the right sort of Christian. So that’s the kind of guy he was. He didn’t fight on this crusade. Then he came back and he helped Henry fight King Louie the ninth who was the Louie who had been in England, the son of Philip, and now he was king because Philip died–as humans do, really, always eventually–and he had inherited the throne. But that actually lessened the admiration that he had for Henry, who was really a very dreadful military leader. He worked for Henry as the administrator for Aquitaine, only there were complaints. There were complaints. So he got investigated for oppressing people in Aquitaine. He was acquitted, but Henry was still suspicious, and he thought he’d misused the funds. So Simon went back to France. But he really wanted to reconcile with Henry. God love him. And he did. But really, it was just too contentious. It was too contentious, and they had very different ideas about how the world should be run. There were a couple of Parliaments and at the second, Simon was going to be one of the king’s official councillors. But the king, who had earlier agreed to the council, changed his mind. So Simon left again. He came back in 1263, with other barons who who had invited him back, because he actually was a good military leader, a very good military leader, unlike Henry, who was not so great. Some barons invited him back, and Simon led a rebellion against the king. That’s just where we are at this point. The rebellion was involved in massacring Jews, who were an integral part of the royal money making and taxation process. Simon’s sons, Simon and Henry, were leaders in the massacres, along with Robert Ferrers and John fitzjohn and Gilbert de Clare. A massacre is at Worcester and London and Winchester and Canterbury and Derby and Lincoln and Northampton. They murdered the humans and they took their money and possessions and they burnt any records of debts there so there were no debts to the Jews. At that point, the king lets Simon de Montfort be the head of the council. But Henry’s son, who was the future Edward the first–Michelle and I talk a lot about Edward the first because we consider him to be an incredibly good king, but we don’t like stuff he does. It’s really hard to admire the greatness of a king who built castles all over Wales and stole the Stone of Scotland but this is the future Edward the first. Henry’s not dead yet. He’s going to be one of the strongest and most intelligent and scary of the English kings. He got a bunch of the barons onto the royal side with bribes of money and offices. He was very canny in that way. And so there’s a civil war. That’s the beginning of the Second Barons war in 1264. The royalists trap the rebel barons in London but Simon de Montfort marched out and won the Battle of Lewes. At that point, King Henry, Prince Edward, and Richard of Cornwall were all captured. De Montfort canceled all the debts that Christians owed to the Jews in England. He set up a government wherein the king would govern but with the approval of the council, and he would consult with Parliament. There had been elected Parliaments before in England but de Montfort, besides sending orders to the counties of England and the charter towns–the chartered boroughs–to elect two representatives. So that’s where the representatives were coming from. It included not just nobles, but regular citizens. That’s the first of the elected Parliaments. It’s Simon de Montfort’s parliament that includes the commoners. That structure of Parliament is what is still existing in England. However, Prince Edward escaped because he was Prince Edward–I forget what he did, I think he bribed one of the guards–but he got out and the Anglo-Norman marcher lords in Wales favored him. Gilbert de Clared defected because he got jealous and resentful of Simon’s power and success, and Edward captured more of Simon’s followers. Then what he did–and this is one of those brilliant military moves that’s just God awful in terms of, is this moral? No. Is it brilliant? Yes, it is. He fooled Simon–who was, as I said, also a very really good military leader–by marching with the de Montfort banners that he had captured, thereby maneuvering him into having to fight in desperate conditions. Simon’s forces were fighting uphill against a much larger crew, and he would never have done that, except that he had been maneuvered into it. His son Henry was killed. At that point, Simon said it’s time to die. Edward had actually sent a death squad to track down Simon de Montfort in the battle and make sure he was dead. They found him and he was killed by being stabbed in the neck–it was Roger Mortimer who stabbed him in the neck with a lance–and then the royalists went berserk. They cut off his head and testicles, and they put his testicles on either side of his nose. Roger Mortimer sent that head to his wife Maud as a gift. Had you heard that, Michelle?

Michelle Butler  12:44 

I did know that they had…yeah.

Anne Brannen  12:47 

And that it had been sent as a gift?

Michelle Butler  12:50 

Yeah, I did know that.

Anne Brannen  12:52 

Because who is Maude, that he would think that this is a good gift? We just had Valentine’s Day over here and I don’t think anybody got this kind of thing as a gift. Really? I mean, it’s mostly chocolate and flowers, right? It’s like here’s a gift, honey, somebody’s decomposing head with their genitals tacked on it. I don’t think that’s a good present.

Michelle Butler  13:12 

You know, that actually is…there’s a difference between going into battle…there’s two things that have happened. Having tossed out the code of chivalry enough to say, ‘we need to end this, if you find him kill him.’ Edward’s the one who gave that order. I think that in some ways, the de Montfort boys could have accepted that because they would have done the same thing.

Anne Brannen  13:37 

People die in battle, and you do your battle the best you can and you don’t go around hunting down people who were in the battle later, because you already had the battle.

Michelle Butler  13:47 

In general, the note the nobles don’t kill each other. They capture each other and they ransom each other.

Anne Brannen  13:52 

Yes. So something has really changed here, that Edward sent a death squad.

Michelle Butler  13:57 

We’ve seen that before. That’s what William the Conqueror did at Hastings.

Anne Brannen  14:02 

Yes, he did. He was very bad.

Michelle Butler  14:05 

So there’s a code of chivalry unless it really matters, in which case, send a pack of six guys to hunt your dude down and kill him. Make sure he doesn’t walk off the field because that’s how you win. But the mutilation. The mutilation. There’s no justification.

Anne Brannen  14:21 

There’s really no reason. It does make sense if you’re up against Simon de Montfort, you want him off the table because you notice, in this story that he kept leaving and coming back and leaving and coming back. I mean, there’s no way to get Simon de Montfort to stop except by stopping him. That’s just how it is. So fair enough. Okay. Okay. It was a trick using those banners. And I think it’s just so wrong. It was so wrong to use the banners.

Michelle Butler  14:53 

Because of that Edward has to do reputation management, when he becomes king.

Anne Brannen  14:59 

Killing Simon alone, he wouldn’t have had to make that be okay.

Michelle Butler  15:04 

He gets called a leopard.

Anne Brannen  15:08 

Yeah, that’s not good.

Michelle Butler  15:11 

He should be a lion but he’s a leopard, and so he has to do rebranding to salvage his reputation because otherwise nobody would go into any agreements with him. He’s not trustworthy.

Anne Brannen  15:22 

On the subject of Simon de Montfort’s head and the gift to Maud. Roger Mortimer is a marcher lord. Maud is Maud de Braose. She’s the daughter of William de Braose.

Michelle Butler  15:33 

God almighty.

Anne Brannen  15:34 

Her mother is one of the daughters of William Marshal. That really was a very bloody family. So as I say, this is a very, very bad thing to send your wife as a present unless maybe she’s Maud de Braose, I guess that would be okay. There’s nothing about Maud saying, ‘Oh, my God, what the hell have you done? Why did you send this to me? I wanted chocolates.’ We don’t have that, actually. That’s not written down any place. So maybe Maud went, ‘Oh, yay, look at this.’ What do you do with then? Oh, like, ‘would you put this over the castle walls on a pike?’ Because, you know, you can’t leave it in the hall. You got to do something with it. At any rate, I’m fascinated by that gift, but we can move on. 

Michelle Butler  16:18 

The Normans.

Anne Brannen  16:20 

So besides doing that, they also cut de Montfort’s hands and feet off and sent them to various places. Then they buried the rest of them in a church. But the commoners, later they would keep visiting the grave and thinking of it as holy ground. So Henry is going to later have him dug up and be buried in some secret places. After the battle, the soldiers who had fled were found dead in a nearby village. So that was the end of the Second Barons war. That’s all over. So that’s the background to the crime of today. The crime of today wasn’t even what they did to Simon de Montfort. We’re moving on from that. That’s just a thing that happened. The Battle of Evesham, this battle, had been in 1265 and our crime takes place in 1271. Okay. Our dead person. Henry of Almain was the son of Richard of Cornwall, this brother of Henry’s and Eleanor’s, who was the elected king of Germany. So that’s how Henry got his name. It’s from Allemayne. Allemayne. Almain. Fair enough. We remember that Richard is the son of King John, and Henry’s mother was Isabel Marshal, who is the daughter of William Marshal. Everybody’s related, not just by being related to the Plantagenets, but everybody’s related to William Marshal.

Michelle Butler  17:36 

He had a ton of kids and he married them off well, particularly the daughters.

Anne Brannen  17:42 

He’s the nephew of Henry the third. He’s also the nephew of Simon de Montfort, because, you remember, Simon was married to Eleanor, who’s also the daughter of King John and the sister of King Henry and Richard Cornwall. You remember that part. So he was, not surprisingly, very divided in loyalty at the beginning of the Second Barons war, and he told Simon De Montfort that he would not take up arms against either one of them. But he ended up having to do something. He had to decide. So he went with the Royalists. He was captured, along with the other hostages–the king, his cousin Prince Edward–they were all captured at the Battle of Lewes, and then he was released in 1268. So that was great. He went on crusade–ta da do da do–but he got sent back because Edward, who was also on crusade at that point with him, wanted him to go and take care of some problems that had come up in Gascony. Instead of sailing, Henry took the land route from Sicily up on through Italy, and that’s why he was in Viterbo on the 12th of May, in 1271. Guy de Montfort and his brother Simon de Montfort, Jr. had been roaming around Europe since 1266, when Guy, who had been captured at the Battle of Evesham escaped, and Simon Jr., who had missed the battle because he got there too late to help his dad, whom he saw up on a pike. He had tried a little rebellion, which didn’t go anyplace, and he had surrendered and then he escaped. So they got together and they were roaming around Europe. They eventually ended up in Italy, where they heard that their cousin was in Viterbo and they found him at mass at the Church of St. Sylvester. They murdered him while he clutched the altar, begging for mercy. Guy said, ‘you had no mercy for my father and brothers.’ But Henry hadn’t even been at the Battle of Evesham. Oh, and by the way, did anybody see this? Yes, because the cardinals were there. They were having a papal election. So were the kings of France and Sicily. So people saw this. It wasn’t done in secret. The brothers were both excommunicated. King Henry was really pissed off. The Pope was really pissed off. Edward let the pope know that Henry was on a peace mission. He hadn’t been at Evesham. They just killed him because he was associated with the people that had done bad things. Simon died that same year, we are told, cursed by God, a murderer and a fugitive. I don’t know what he died of, but he had been cursed by God. So maybe he died of that. Guy went to fight for Charles of Anjou, which he had done before, but he got captured in 1287 fighting the Aragonese at the Battle of the Counts in 1287 and he died in prison. So that’s what happened to them. Henry’s body was taken to Gloucestershire, and buried at Hailes Abbey, but his heart was put into a golden shrine and is buried in Westminster Abbey, next to the shrine of Edward the Confessor. So that was our crime. It’s a little bitty crime in the middle of a great big story. Michelle, you got lots of stuff, didn’t you? Because obviously, this is going to be something that catches the imagination.

Michelle Butler  21:02 

It really was a scandal. Killing somebody in a church. You know, it’s pretty scandalous.

Anne Brannen  21:09 

We want to do a whole episode on this, by the way, on killing people in churches and claiming sanctuary.

Michelle Butler  21:16 

It’s pretty scandalous. A measure of how scandalous it is, is that Dante references this. Inferno’s completed by 1314. It’s set in 1300. He puts Guy–I think it’s Guy–in hell. He’s in a river of boiling blood. But the way he refers to it, I actually had to read it twice to find it. Because he doesn’t ever say ‘Guy de Montfort.’  He doesn’t ever say ‘Henry de Almain.’ It’s this really oblique reference. He says, “He cleft asunder in God’s bosom, the heart that still upon the Thames is honored.”

Anne Brannen  21:58 

Oh.

Michelle Butler  22:00 

That deeply oblique reference tells me that this was hot news. And it stayed hot for a long time.

Anne Brannen  22:13 

Everybody would have known who this was.

Michelle Butler  22:15 

Everybody knew what that meant.

Anne Brannen  22:17 

Oh, it was it was a terrible crime. They murdered their cousin, who hadn’t even done the thing that they murdered him for. They murdered him in the church at mass during a papal election.

Michelle Butler  22:30 

When the priest tried to stop between them, they killed him too.

Anne Brannen  22:33 

Oh I didn’t know that part. Thank you.

Michelle Butler  22:34 

Oh my god. Yep. It’s just so dreadful. It’s terrible.

Anne Brannen  22:38 

Would Simon de Montfort himself have ever done that? No, he has these really…these are inferior children, I tell you.

Michelle Butler  22:47 

Some sources that I found said that Henry was clutching to the altar, and they chopped off three of his fingers to drag him out. So it’s bad.

Anne Brannen  22:58 

Henry had been at one of the battles and he hadn’t ever wanted to fight at all. It wasn’t a political thing for him. It was, ‘these are my uncles. These are my uncles.’ So it was very bad of his cousins to kill him.

Michelle Butler  23:12 

His dad kind of likes this approach too. The ‘stay down here in Cornwall and mind our own business.’ This is not the first time we’ve run across Dante sticking one of our murderers in hell.

Anne Brannen  23:27 

Oh, no. We started with Dante, but he wasn’t in hell…Cangrande della Scala.

Michelle Butler  23:33 

Oh, yes.

Anne Brannen  23:34 

That was why we did it. Because it was Dante and you want Dante.

Michelle Butler  23:38 

Mm hmm. There was another one though. Ulberto, who is also in hell. This amuses me greatly, because you run across discussions of Dante and it’s all about this elevated poetry and it’s thinking big thoughts. Yeah, okay. But it’s also settling medieval scores and spilling the tea about contemporary–

Anne Brannen  24:03 

Yes, because he put somebody into hell who wasn’t dead yet, didn’t he?

Michelle Butler  24:07 

Yeah.

Anne Brannen  24:08 

I remember that.

Michelle Butler  24:09 

There’s a lost play that we know existed, from 1592. We know it existed because it’s discussed by Henslowe in his inaccurately named Henslowe’s Diary. It’s not a diary. It’s business records of what they were doing. It’s actually really important. It’s one of the ways we know about the economics of early modern theatre.

Anne Brannen  24:36 

That was one of the ways that they use the word ‘diary.’

Michelle Butler  24:38 

So maybe that’s what’s going on.

Anne Brannen  24:38 

We think of it as a journal, but journal meant journal, and that meant daily accounts.

Michelle Butler  24:40 

So that’s what’s going on then. The word has shifted its meaning. Henslowe’s son-in-law was Edward Alleyn, the actor, and between the two of them, they have 1000s of pages of manuscripts that have this stuff in it. There’s also a couple of other useful things among that. One of them is the sole surviving actor’s part from a play from the period from Orlando Furioso. That’s part of this archive. Here’s a quote from the Henslowe-Alleyn digitization project, which is henslowe-alleyn.org.uk: “As a group, these manuscripts comprise the largest and most important single extant archive of material on the professional theater and dramatic performance in early modern England.” So it’s a really important collection.

Anne Brannen  25:42 

And it’s digitized, we can go and look at it?

Michelle Butler  25:44 

Yes.

Anne Brannen  25:45 

You’ll give us the link.

Michelle Butler  25:46 

Yep. It’s important stuff. Alleyn is the founder of Dulwich College in London, which is actually a K through 12 school. It was in their archive that this was held for a very long time.

Anne Brannen  26:05 

When did they find it?

Michelle Butler  26:07 

It was found in the 19th century. The manuscript has suffered some trials and tribulations. Edward Malone took it home for a while…Edward Malone, he is a great scholar, the Malone society is named for him. But the 19th century just didn’t have developed scholarly concepts, I guess, as much as now, because he took souvenirs from this manuscript.

Anne Brannen  26:37 

It’s kind of like the whole feeling of imperialism and colonization spilled over into medieval manuscripts. The same way that you can, like, take statues out of Egypt and bring them on over and just stick them in the museum, you can take a manuscript and cut pieces out if you like–I mean, hello–because you’re English.

Michelle Butler  26:59 

Famous people, people whose signatures he really wanted, were in there, and he just snipped them out and kept them.

Anne Brannen  27:07 

Totally entitled. Nowadays, if he showed up, we could write a little thing and send it into Reddit, you know, entitled people. Yep.

Michelle Butler  27:13 

Oh, yes. Before I move off into 19th century scholars mistreating early modern records, the actual play was called Harry of Cornwall. Yeah, I’m so traumatized by the…

Anne Brannen  27:28 

I’m so sorry, Michelle, that you had to read about manuscripts being hurt.

Michelle Butler  27:31 

Oh, my Lord.

Anne Brannen  27:32 

At least no cheese sandwiches were being used as bookmarks. That was, I remember, an issue in one of our earlier podcasts.

Michelle Butler  27:40 

It was performed by Lord Strange’s men at the Rose Playhouse in 1592. It did really well. ‘Received: 32 shillings.’

Anne Brannen  27:49 

Ooh, nice.

Michelle Butler  27:50 

Yes. There’s a different website called Henslowe as a Blog that takes an entry per day and puts it out there, and so this day’s entry, what we get told about it is “Harry of Cornwall provided Henslowe with his most impressive box office so far. It made more than twice as much as Sir John Mandeville did yesterday”–so, the play they were talking about the day before. But it’s lost.

So it was called Henry of Cornwall.

It’s called Harry of Cornwall.

Anne Brannen  28:25 

Harry of Cornwall, rather than Harry Almain.

Michelle Butler  28:30 

They’re pretty sure–we don’t know for certain but they’re pretty sure it’s about Henry getting murdered. One of the reasons they think that is that another play in the repertoire, it’s an Edward the first play and it starts with–totally not historically what happened–Simon and Guy getting dragged in front of Edward the first to answer for the murder of Henry.

Anne Brannen  28:40 

That would have been nice, but it didn’t happen.

Michelle Butler  28:54 

They think that these plays were being done in repertoire together.

Anne Brannen  29:02 

Also if you’re going to have a play called Harry of Cornwall, and it’s about Henry of Almain, really the only thing that’s dramatic that you could put on the stage would be the murder. You’d have to build up to it, kinda like I did with the Barons Wars.

Michelle Butler  29:16 

Yeah.

Anne Brannen  29:18 

That’s it. Things that Henry did: got murdered at the altar.

Michelle Butler  29:22 

This blogger says that the Italians apparently believed that Henry’s heart had been placed in a golden cup on London Bridge, where it still dripped blood into the Thames because Henry had not been avenged.

Anne Brannen  29:34 

I think they’re right. And it’s probably still there. Oh, wait, no, this is London Bridge?

Michelle Butler  29:39 

Yes.

Anne Brannen  29:40 

Well, that’s in Arizona so it can’t do that anymore.

Michelle Butler  29:42 

That’s connected to Dante. How it’s discussed in Dante. Anyway. Henry’s heart probably isn’t actually in Westminster Abbey anymore because the heart shrine was placed in the shrine of Edward the Confessor, but then that shrine was rebuilt in the reign of Mary the first and it appears to have gotten lost in the renovations, as sometimes happens.

Anne Brannen  30:05 

A heart would get lost. The gold shrine probably didn’t get lost so much as repurposed.

Michelle Butler  30:11 

It didn’t make the leap once things were being put back in.

Anne Brannen  30:15 

Well, so it’s not there anymore. I didn’t know that. I don’t like to know that because I wanted his heart to still be there in Westminster.

Michelle Butler  30:22 

According to Westminster Abbey, it’s not.

Anne Brannen  30:24 

If I was Westminster Abbey, I’d be much more liable, if I was going to lie, to say that something was there that wasn’t, but you just can’t see it.

Michelle Butler  30:31 

I mean, maybe they do a full inventory…

Anne Brannen  30:36 

Nobody ever does full inventories. Everybody’s always gonna do an inventory–even if you do a partial inventory, you always find some stuff. ‘Oh, my God. Look at that.’

Michelle Butler  30:45 

The big old forger that I ran across that I’m hoping to have a reason to talk about at some point in more detail is John Payne Collier, who was notorious.

Anne Brannen  30:45 

This sounds like a 19th century name.

Michelle Butler  31:00 

He is so much. Let me quote this blog post by Matthew Lyons. “John Payne Collier. Three words sure to chill the heart of any scholar working on early modern literary texts, because Collier was that most interesting a phenomena: a fine scholar who was also a first class fraud.” One of the things he did was borrow–they let him walk out with the manuscript, the unique manuscript of Henslowe’s Diary–and then when he published it, he interpolated stuff that should have been there.

Anne Brannen  31:38 

Okay, wait. Was some of that stuff the stuff that had been cut out?

Michelle Butler  31:42 

No. Edward Malone made off with signatures of people he wanted to be able to post into his autograph book like some kind of early modern fanboy.

Anne Brannen  31:53 

So Collier just added some stuff?

Michelle Butler  31:55 

He added things that he wanted to be there. I had known about JW Walker doing this with the Towneley plays, wanting to connect them to Wakefield.

Anne Brannen  32:07 

Which you can do if you make some stuff up.

Michelle Butler  32:08 

My goodness gracious. This was not as uncommon…Collier did this a lot, actually.

Anne Brannen  32:14 

What was he making up in Henslow’s Diary?

Michelle Butler  32:18 

He’s making up additional entries. He is wild. He pretended at one point to have found a second first folio in which he had written–it was called the Perkins folio–in which he passed off–now I’m quoting–“he passed off his own emendations to Shakespeare as the work of a near contemporary” and there are over 20,000 corrections that he added. In 2004, a brand new book came out that is the authoritative, exhaustive work–I can’t imagine how long it took these people to do this–on him as both a critic and a forger. It is 14,183 pages long in  two volumes. I have ordered a copy because I need to see this but it hasn’t come yet.

Anne Brannen  33:11 

Did you buy it or are you–

Michelle Butler  33:12 

I bought it. From a delightful bookstore in, I think, New Hampshire.

Anne Brannen  33:24 

So it’s like one volume about the criticism and the other volume about the forgeries or are they just kind of sprinkled…?

Michelle Butler  33:30 

He forged so many things. Here, I’ll just read this. It’s wild. “Aside from including deliberate fictions and falsehoods in printed records of archival material, he also introduced forgeries into the archives themselves, faking official documents, adding information to letters and diaries, falsifying registers and inventories, and more. He tampered with at least 57 authentic manuscripts and rare printed material.”

Anne Brannen  33:57 

Oh good god.

Michelle Butler  34:00 

He forged entire ballads, some of which have made their way into anthologies as authentic.

Anne Brannen  34:09 

I was going to ask how much impact he’s had on scholarship because surely some of this stuff wasn’t caught until later.

Michelle Butler  34:16 

It’s so difficult because, say, 75% of his work is really good scholarship. Then you have this other 25% where he’s like, ‘it should have been like this,’ or ‘this will make a great paper,’ or, ‘I’m sure this is true, I just haven’t found the evidence so I’ll just fudge it.’

Anne Brannen  34:33 

This is not a scholarly method.

Michelle Butler  34:35 

It’s so much worse than somebody like Thomas Middleton who was forging ballads, medieval ballads. We know that all of them, all his stuff, is forged. So great, that’s so much easier. This is terrible.

Anne Brannen  34:50 

Because some of it’s true. Is there a kind of consensus now that we’ve been able to sift the chaff from the grain?

Michelle Butler  34:58 

Yeah, we’ve got the big two volumes set that does that work but if you have to work with this guy, you have to check everything and of course there have to be new editions of everything he worked on because you have to go through and check it all. But his edition of Henslowe’s Diary was the published ones for like 60 years, until somebody went ‘wait a second, that’s not real.’ Where they really haven’t Cafe

Anne Brannen  35:25 

‘Were they really having cafe oles over in Dorset?’ I don’t think so. ‘Did they really put on Angels in America?’ No, they did not.

Michelle Butler  35:31 

I had to really restrain myself from wandering off down a John Collier rabbit hole. But if that 1500 page book had come I absolutely would have been reading it before this. The church where Henry was murdered is still there. You can go visit it. There’s a plaque commemorating the murder.

Anne Brannen  35:47 

Yeah, because the Italians must have been pretty upset.

Michelle Butler  35:49 

They weren’t thrilled. Sharon Kay Penman’s Welsh Princess trilogy, the second book in it is all about Simon de Montfort.

Anne Brannen  35:57 

I like that trilogy.

Michelle Butler  35:59 

The third book is after Simon is dead, but it shows the murder of Henry de Almain.

Anne Brannen  36:06 

Eleanor gets real upset.

Michelle Butler  36:07 

There is a brand new, 2022 book by Carol McGrath called The Damask Rose that is actually about Eleanor of Castile, Edward’s queen, but it does mention the murder of Henry. I would have liked to have read Harry of Cornwall. I’m sad that that’s lost. That would have been really interesting. It did well. They did it in London, they earned money, and then they took it on tour when the plague shut down the theaters–the next year when they had to go to Bristol they took it on tour. So it would have been nice to read it.

Anne Brannen  36:37 

I would like to see how it is they built up to the murder. You know, how it is they contextualize it. I would like to see that.

Michelle Butler  36:44 

I would have liked to have known what they did with it and where the sympathy is in the play. Because sometimes I’m surprised where the sympathies of a piece are. There’s so much stuff going on with history plays in the 1590s. It just would have been really interesting to see this one, not usual suspects of Richard the third or the Henrys. It would have been interesting to see. But alas, nobody bothered to keep it.

Anne Brannen  37:09 

Or they did keep it and then as Byron says, somebody used it to line pie tins.

Michelle Butler  37:14 

It’s hard with the plays, because if you write them down, then somebody else can do them. So you’re trying to keep your economic advantage by keeping your play secret. I understand. But it would have been nice.

Anne Brannen  37:25 

It’s not like if you’re in York, where you have to write things down because some other people are going to be doing the same thing next year. No. That’s what happens when you make theatres professional. Everything changes, doesn’t it?

Michelle Butler  37:36 

So that’s what I have. A play I don’t have. Dante telling us that it was a super huge scandal that he could refer to very obliquely half a century later, and everybody was like, ‘Yeah, we know that, we remember.’

Anne Brannen  37:50 

It was really bad.

Michelle Butler  37:51 

Oh it was super bad. I’m totally fascinated by the image of what they think is happening, that the shrine’s been clamped on to London Bridge and is just sitting there dripping, because nobody’s avenged–

Anne Brannen  38:06 

Yeah, who made this up?

Michelle Butler  38:07 

That’s a great image.

Anne Brannen  38:08 

The heart got put into a golden shrine. So it’s encased in gold. Clearly that is information that is the foundation of this particular picture that someone has invented, but I really am like when? who’s the first to say this? When did this start? It was in Italy that they were saying this? Nobody said this in England. For one thing, you could go to London and notice that it wasn’t there. So there was that.

Michelle Butler  38:33 

But you know, from Italy you’re not going to do that.

Anne Brannen  38:38 

So that is interesting. But avenging–what would that have looked like? I mean, just more deaths. They got excommunicated. Nobody liked them. They had sad, short little lives after this. His death was supposedly some kind of avenging of their dad’s death, and it didn’t avenge anything. He didn’t do it. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t even nearby.

Michelle Butler  39:05 

He’s who they could get ahold of. They couldn’t get ahold of Edward, who had given the order to kill Simon, although I would be astonished if Edward had given the order to mutilate him.

Anne Brannen  39:18 

I don’t think he did. I think they just went berserk.

Michelle Butler  39:21 

Edward’s a pretty pragmatic person, and I just don’t see that.

Anne Brannen  39:25 

They couldn’t get a hold of Mortimer, who seems to be a big instigator of the hacking things up.

Michelle Butler  39:32 

He’s who they could get a hold of. But I’m starting to think that every war in the Middle Ages is a cousin’s war.

Anne Brannen  39:37 

Well, it sure as hell is in England. They’re all related. That is our discussion of the very, very sad murder of a guy who didn’t deserve it at all in 1271. The next time that you hear from us, we’re going to be in Poland in the 13th century, where the high Duke of Poland got murdered kind of ignominiously. So we’re gonna be discussing that. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today only with less technology. We can be found on Spotify and Apple podcast and all the places where the podcasts are hanging out. The website is Truecrimemedieval.com, true crimemedieval is all one word. You can find the show notes and links to the podcast and transcriptions. You can leave comments and get a hold of us there. We’d love to hear from you. The Middle Ages. Some very badly behaved people today. Bye.

93. Michael Servetus is Murdered, Geneva, Republic of Geneva 1553

Anne Brannen  0:24 

Hello, and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Branenn. I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:32 

And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:35 

Last time we were around, we were doing something over in Puritan England, which really isn’t medieval at all, but it was a special episode for Christmas. Today we’re going back into the Middle Ages, where really we’re supposed to be, and we are in Geneva, in 1553, where Michael Servetus was burned at the stake for heresy. That’s where we are. Sometimes in the 1000 years of people behaving badly, they behave really, really badly. That’s where we are. Servetus was born in 1511, in either Aragon or Navarre–it’s unclear. What his name actually is, we’re not clear on either, but we’re going to call him Servetus. His father was a notary, so education was a thing that was expected and liked in his household. He was a notary at a nearby monastery and Servetus, as he grew up, studied widely–widely, I tell you, both in subjects and in places. He was proficient in Latin and Greek, he could read Hebrew, looks like he could read Arabic. I’m assuming he knew Spanish and French also. He was a polymath. He studied widely. First he went to a grammar school–a grammar studium–in Aragon. By 1520, he was studying Liberal Arts at the University of Zaragoza, where he got a bachelor’s and a master’s degree–he got those degrees there. In 1527, he started studying law at the University of Toulouse. Then there was a little interval where he didn’t have any formal schooling. It wasn’t like he stopped studying because basically his entire life was him studying all things. But for a while, he wasn’t in school. He was traveling in Germany and Italy, he was serving as secretary to Charles the fifth’s–Holy Roman Emperor Charles the fifth’s–confessor. In 1531, he started publishing his writing. The first works were in theology, The Errors of the Trinity, Dialogues on the Trinit,  and On the Justice of Christ’s Reign. In 1533, he started studying at the College de Calvi, which was a literary college attached to the Sorbonne, and he published a translation into French of Ptolemy’s Geography and an edition of the Bible. He wrote a medical treatise defending the work of Champier, a doctor and his patron. Then he published a bunch of other medical books. After which, in 1536, he studied medicine. I love this timeline. He wrote a bunch of medical books, and then he studied medicine. But in the medical books that he was writing before he actually started studying medicine, he made discoveries. [sigh] How old was he, when he died? He was like, in his 30s, I think?

Michelle Butler  3:39 

He was born in 1511, and he died in 1553. So 42.

Anne Brannen  3:48 

So 42 is still young in my book, and even at that time, because although life expectancy was lower, but not because adults died younger than they do later. It’s because of the enormously large infant death rate. At any rate, I think he was young when he died. So, 1536, he’s studying medicine in Paris, and also while he was studying, he was teaching medicine and astrology. He made an astronomy prediction concerning Mars and the Moon, and Mars occluding the moon, that turned out to be true. The medicine professors were just really annoyed at him. You know, he was writing about astrology and they were annoyed. So the Dean of the School of Medicine suspended his teaching. It’s like being a TA and they throw you out. You still have to go to your classes. So Servetus wrote a treatise against the dean, the dean argued to the university that Servetus should be put to death on account of teaching Cicero’s work on divination. At that point, Servetus left Paris. He finished up his medical study at Montpellier. In 1539, he became a doctor of medicine. Okay, so that’s his last degree. That’s the end of his formal training. We’ve now gone through all of his training all over Europe. So he’s a doctor, an actual doctor, not a doctor like me and Michelle, which are doctors of literature. If you have a horrible, horrible emergency where you need to know something about medieval drama, we’re there for you. We’re there. But we can’t actually fix you if you fall and break your leg. He became a physician to some important people. He began at that time to correspond with John Calvin. Okay, Michelle, and I just had our little moment where we were sad.

Michelle Butler  5:48 

That was a bad turn of events.

Anne Brannen  5:51 

You can see why he would want to correspond with Calvin, because Calvin’s a theologian and a thinker, and he’s in Geneva, and he’s founded an entire religion, you know, an entire branch of Protestantism. At any rate he did. He began to correspond with John Calvin, and he became a French citizen. So now he’s no longer Spanish. He’s now a Frenchman. He wrote a book, again, on the Trinity and how it doesn’t exist. That would be The Restoration of Christianity, which he published in 1553. Besides the theology, which included an argument against predestination, something that would annoy Calvin, he included a description of the pulmonary system. It was the first one to be written down in Europe, although it was probably connected to an earlier Arabic work. It’s in the middle of all this theology, which explains why later, it’s not really going to be discovered until sometime after his death. Because, you know, if you were looking for medical treatises, you didn’t go on over to the thing about the restoration of Christianity and how there’s no predestination and started looking for medical works. He just stuck it in there. It’s just not in the same genre whatsoever. So Calvin didn’t like this, as was predictable. He had seen an early version. Years before, while Servetus was working on it, he’d sent an early draft. So then he’d sent a book that he’d written to Servetus and Servetus wrote all in the margin a whole bunch of criticism and sent it back to Calvin, and Calvin didn’t like that. Calvin wrote to Servetus, saying he was insulting sound doctrine doctrine with great audacity.

Michelle Butler  7:43 

That’s pretty much Servetus’ life motto.

Anne Brannen  7:46 

I think really it is. It’s like not just that he was thinking about things, making theories about things he wasn’t supposed to be having theories about, he just was not kind of mild and meek, when he did it.

Michelle Butler  8:00 

No. My favorite little thing about him–well, there’s many things I like, but one of them is that on the title page of this book, the one that gets him into all kinds of trouble, it has, in Hebrew, “and at that time shall Michael stand up and war broke out in heaven.”  Which is not really what you do. That’s not the work of a modest sort of person. And somebody who’s supposedly trying to keep his authorship secret.

Anne Brannen  8:31 

Yes, and not, you know, die. So it was at this time, after this thing with the exchanging of books and writing stuff down in the margin, it was about this time that Calvin said to a friend in Geneva that if Servetus came to Geneva, Calvin would not let him leave alive. Though Servetus, much like Abelard–we had a podcast on Abelard and we were discussing how Abelard went all over to all these different places making everybody annoyed. Servetus kind of did that. He was really good at annoying people. But it’s there that things began to fall apart in 1553. He was denounced-he was still in France at Vienne–he was denounced by another friend of Calvin and letters that he had sent to Calvin and sections of his book were the evidence for his heresy. He was arrested and the authorities–these are the Roman Catholics who are arresting him, later it will be the Protestants– but they were both after him. The Roman Catholics in France arrested him but he escaped. He escaped. This is the point at which he actually could have gotten away. Like, not just escaping but you know, not getting dead very, very quickly. While he was at large, he and his books were burned in effigy because he wasn’t there to be burnt. So they burned his books and they burnt an effigy of him, because he had been found guilty of heresy. Calvin sent a bunch more letters proving his horrible badness and then–what the hell?–he was gonna go to Italy and he stopped in Geneva. I do not…why? Why does he do this? Michelle, did you find anything that explained why the hell Servetus went to Geneva?

Michelle Butler  10:34 

Nope. I found a whole bunch of people asking the same question. What was he thinking?

Anne Brannen  10:38 

So along with everybody else who thinks about this, we are in agreement. What the hell? What the hell? Did he have to go to Geneva? No. He could have gone to Italy, written some more books, gotten in trouble with the Roman Catholics there, then gone to Germany, written some more books got in trouble with the Protestants.

Michelle Butler  10:59 

He could have come to the new world.

Anne Brannen  11:00 

He could have, actually yes, there. That was a thing that could have happened. I don’t know. The Pilgrims wouldn’t have like him. Especially if he celebrates Christmas. That would not have been good. So he went to Geneva. And not only was he in Geneva, he attended one of Calvin’s sermons, where he got arrested.

Michelle Butler  11:24 

The choices here are just puzzling.

Anne Brannen  11:28 

Stupid. They’re stupid. He’s not a stupid person. Something’s going on in his thinking. What he’s planning, we have no idea. Anyway, he was arrested. France wanted him back. They wanted to extradite him to France, because they had condemned him first. So really, they should get to kill him. But Calvin wouldn’t let him be extradited. Because he was just as as good at punishing heretics as the Roman Catholics were. It’s a point of pride, really. So Servetus was condemned. Hello. Specifically, he was condemned for arguing against the Trinity, and for arguing against the baptism of infants. In other words, God is not three parts of God in one, God is God, and he sort of makes himself into other things such as Jesus or the Holy Spirit, but God is God, Jesus, Jesus, Holy Spirit,  Holy Spirit. The point about the baptism being that it makes no sense to baptize people who don’t know what kind of commitment they’re making on account of they are babies. Those are the main points, though he was also questioned about why he wasn’t married, which is probably a way of trying to see if they could get at his sexuality and drag that in there. But that didn’t work. He said that he had some kind of injury that caused him to not be part of the crew of people that gets married. They were also concerned because he had read the Koran. They accused him of having read the Koran, which actually he had, and because he defended both Jews and Muslims. I mean, there’s really nothing to dislike about this guy. Except that, you know, he has no manners.

Michelle Butler  13:14 

Yeah. I hadn’t made the connection with Abelard. But you’re right, he’s one of these brilliant people who don’t understand or have any patience for other people. So he’s constantly stepping on toes, because the whole manner is, ‘keep up.’

Anne Brannen  13:30 

Yeah, keep up, keep up.

Michelle Butler  13:32 

My favorite part of his defense is when he wrote a little treatise that argued that…because they got tired of letting him talk in the courtroom because he was running rings around their prosecutor, he asked for a piece of paper, so he could prepare his defense. They gave him one piece of paper. What he wrote up was a treatise arguing that punishing heretics with capital punishment is not consistent with the Bible. It’s great. I mean, he’s not wrong. It’s not in the New Testament.

Anne Brannen  14:11 

No, I mean, his thinking is good. His thinking was good.

Michelle Butler  14:15 

But it’s this sad moment, you know, because he thinks that logic is still gonna matter.

Anne Brannen  14:20 

Right. Right. Right. And it doesn’t.

Michelle Butler  14:23 

Not a bit.

Anne Brannen  14:23 

He gets into trouble in Paris because he’s annoying the other professors of medicine. He gets into trouble in Geneva because he annoys Calvin.

Michelle Butler  14:34 

You are a special sort of person in the 16th century if the Catholics and the Calvinists hate you with the same fervor.

Anne Brannen  14:43 

There really should be some kind of medal for this.

Michelle Butler  14:46 

This also reminds me of the Cathars. 

Anne Brannen  14:49 

How so?

Michelle Butler  14:50 

In terms of his primary concern is about having a Christianity that is more about compassion.

Anne Brannen  14:56 

Ah. Right.

Michelle Butler  14:59 

It’s not that it’s theologically similar, it’s that it’s coming from this impulse of why are we so nasty?

Anne Brannen  15:05 

Which is part of the being accepting of other religions, which is something that is going to get mentioned later by me. Also, when he was being tried, he refused to name his friends. That might have mitigated the punishment, but he refused to do it. As with Joan of Arc–now we are reminded of Joan of Arc–because the law did not cover Servetus getting executed. It was illegal to execute him, because he was not a citizen of Geneva. They were supposed to banish him. But the way that they got around this was essentially by ignoring it. With Joan of Arc, they did some convoluted things to make the charges and have some reasoning behind them even though they didn’t. Basically, they wanted her dead, so they figured out how to do it and how to make it look legal. But it was not with Servetus. They wanted him dead, and they didn’t even bother to make it look legal. Calvin wanted him beheaded. Which was nice of Calvin. It’s so beautiful for a little moment here, where Calvin is really well behaved. But burning at the stake, it was what he got sentenced to. It was the 27th of October 1553. He was burned alive on a pile of his books and green wood so as to keep things going longer and make it more torturous. He had one of his books tied to him. It was bad. It was really bad. So that’s, that’s it. I think you wanted to say something about the book being tied to him. Michelle, what were you telling me? It was Marguerite Porete that you were reminded of?

Michelle Butler  16:50 

Yes. The emphasis not just on destroying the person, but on destroying the ideas reminded me of Marguerite. These ideas are considered to be so dangerous that they’re trying to destroy them.

Anne Brannen  17:03 

In both cases, as it turned out, they didn’t manage to do it. Because there was just like three copies in this case, I think one in Marguerite’s case. If a copy of a book survives, the book can be read. So what happened, now that I have told you all the story? There was a great deal of criticism of Servetus’ execution. There was strong criticism of Calvin, though it didn’t do any damage to Calvin’s reputation in Geneva, or at least his power in Geneva. The rest of Europe was really upset about this. But having Servetus executed is the beginning of Calvin’s consolidation of his authority. After he got rid of Servetus, he got rid of the Libertines. The Libertines were a group of powerful Genevans, they were big in the city, who argued that having been saved by grace, they did not have to follow the laws of either church or state. Calvin didn’t like that. So he got them executed too, in 1555. They were no longer a force, and Calvin was unopposed in Geneva. He was known across Europe as a major reformer. Killing off Servetus was useful for Calvin. So Servetus’ death had not much impact on Calvin. Indeed, it seems to have been a good career move, really, as regards his power at least, but he was criticized by the humanists across Europe for killing Servetus. Modern day Calvinists need to kind of need to explain this away, because this is not a good piece of Calvin’s reputation. The arguments for Calvin not being horrendous in this case. Here’s the points. Powers across Europe were killing heretics and the Roman Catholic Church wanted Servetus dead too so, you know, there you go. He was going to be dead anyway. Also, Calvin was just following the law. Although not really. It was a law about heresy, but it wasn’t a law about ‘can you kill the heretics in Geneva?’ It was the Council of Geneva that made the final decision. It wasn’t Kelvin. And he wanted Servetus to be beheaded rather than burned at the stake. Also Servetus was the only heretic that was executed in Geneva while Calvin was alive. There were lots and lots and lots more people killed in the rest of Europe, all throughout Europe, 1000s and 1000s of people killed for being heretics. So Calvin’s not so bad. Basically, this is a whole list of whataboutism.  There’s really no good argument for the goodness of Calvin concerning the burning at the stake of Servetus. It’s just basically ‘some other people behaved badly too.’ I don’t find that a compelling sort of argument myself.

Michelle Butler  20:04 

Interesting. The book that I read talked some about the Catholic Protestant wars that happen, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and then the 30 Years War. I really didn’t know too much about that because my education has largely been England focused. The discussion over there is, oh, that stuff was happening over in Europe, but not here.

Anne Brannen  20:27 

Why the pilgrims went to Holland.  That’s the only connection. But Servetus did have an impact on the world. Some decades after his death, his work on the pulmonary system was found–that one that was kind of hidden in the theological treatise. And so three copies managed to not get burnt at the stake, the treatise on the pulmonary system was discovered, and he wrote other books that contributed to the field of medicine. And his theology had an impact. His writings were first studied in Italy. The humanists there, being exiled, went to Poland and Transylvania, which is where they established what would become the Unitarian Church. Servetus was not Unitarian, although the connection to early Unitarianism is not holding with the Trinity existing. But he’s recognized as the first martyr in Unitarianism, the first Unitarian martyr, and there’s some other groups that claim connections to him. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, for instance, are an example. Besides the theology per se, his execution for his ideas has had a very powerful legacy in the struggle for freedom of thought and conscience. As mentioned above, there was indignation across Europe at Servetus’ murder. Also, one of the things he had been in trouble about was his tolerance and defense of the of Jews and Muslims. So the humanists spoke out. Sebastian Castillo wrote, here’s my quote, “to kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, it is to kill a man. If Calvin had killed Servetus for saying what he believed to be true, then Calvin killed him for telling the truth. He should have been taught, not killed, if he was wrong. I believe that on judgment day, God will judge morals and not doctrines.” And there are scholars on Ángel Alcalá and Marian Hillar, for instance, who posits Servetus as the starting point for a whole line of history which ends up forming Western democracies and the rule of law. So the Italian humanists, as mentioned, had fled to Poland and Transylvania. After that, they went to Holland, where their ideas from there went to England and then to America and Thomas Jefferson was interested in Servetus’ ideas, which then influenced the Constitution. So Servetus continued through history to influence thought very strongly. But my final thing. I want to explain finally that Servetus had been burned in effigy, then he was actually burned at the stake. But he got burned in effigy again. Did you know this, Michelle?

Michelle Butler  23:15 

No.

Anne Brannen  23:15 

I think that you will like this. In 1941, the Vichy government in France that was collaborating with the Nazis melted down a commemorative statue of Servetus, which had been erected in  Annemasse, close to Geneva, but in French territory, because Geneva itself didn’t want the statue, but they said it was okay to have a plaque. So the statue of Servetus got burnt down. The French Resistance put a ribbon on the monument that read “To Michael Servetus, first victim of fascism.” The statue got rebuilt in 1960. So that is what I came with. Michelle, you found some stuff. What did you find?

Michelle Butler  24:00 

You want to know about the surviving copies first?

Anne Brannen  24:03 

Tell me about the surviving copies.

Michelle Butler  24:05 

I’m working from a 2002 book called Out of the Flames. It is one of these popular books that is scholarly informed, so it’s not always easy to track their sources. They do have a bunch of sources, but it’s not copiously footnoted, because that’s not how this genre of work goes. It’s published by Random House, so it’s intended for a popular audience. I will say it’s very well written. It is surprisingly fun to read. I have been trying to corroborate it, because what it does is trace the provenance of these three surviving books, and I have been trying to double check that provenance. I do find people who generally agree with the provenance. So the delicious irony of these three surviving copies is that there’s a really good chance that two of them survive because they were part of the trial.

Anne Brannen  25:01 

So they were in the trial documents?

Michelle Butler  25:03 

No. There’s no way to definitively prove this, but one looks very much as if it’s Calvin’s personal copy, in which he wrote a bunch of notes about why he was mad about it. The other one looks very much as if it is the prosecutor’s. Germain Colladon, who was acting on behalf of the city in the trial. It’s got his notes.

Anne Brannen  25:34 

So they look like pieces of evidence. They were pieces of evidence in the trial.

Michelle Butler  25:38 

Yes. Now, the third copy is in the National Library of Vienna, and we know how that one got there. Its provenance can be traced all the way back to the 17th century. It turns up in a book stall in England in 1665, and an expat Hungarian…so what’s going on is that England has been the repository for a bunch of expat aristocrats and their stuff because at the moment, it’s a more stable place than the rest of Europe because of the Protestant Catholic fighting that’s going on.

Anne Brannen  26:21 

Right.By this time in England…it had been bad, but by this time in England, it had gotten settled.

Michelle Butler  26:26 

It was a little bit more stable. An Expat Hungarian aristocrat sees it, recognizes what it is, takes it home, and donates it to the Unitarian Church in Transylvania.

Anne Brannen  26:38 

Oh, so it was a Hungarian who knew about the Unitarian Church, and therefore knew about Servetus.

Michelle Butler  26:45 

Yeah. This particular aristocrat was a Unitarian. He takes it home, donates it, where it stays for about another 100 years, until the king of that area–let me find my note on this–the king of that area really, really, really wanted a copy of this book. The Hungarian aristocrat is Count Teleki, by the way.

I know that name. Why…? Probably when I was hanging out with the Unitarians. I’ve probably heard the name.

He also started one of the first Hungarian public libraries, in 1802. Joseph the second was king of the area, and he really, really wanted a copy of this book. A French book collector and scholar, the Duc de Lavalliere had pulled together a library of 100,000 volumes. He had started collecting in 1738. When he died in 1780, he had 100,000 volumes. Among them was a copy of Servetus’ book, the one that was probably owned by or probably used by the prosecutor Colladon.

Anne Brannen  27:57 

Okay, so that’s where that one is.

Michelle Butler  27:58 

That’s where that one is. Joseph the second really, really wants it. So he sends a representative there to bid on it. But he loses out to the Bibliotech Royale, which is about to become the Bibliotech Nationale.

Anne Brannen  28:12 

Some crimes that are past our time, even when we’re doing special episodes.

Michelle Butler  28:21 

What happens is that the Unitarians back in Transylvania see their moment, and it ends up being a gift to the king in order to protect them. He’s really thrilled when they give him this beautiful–and this is the only unmarked copy. This one apparently went straight from the publisher to somebody’s shelf, and then it sat there for a while. So that one ends up in the National Library in Vienna. The Colladon copy, the one that was used by the prosecutor, is now in the Bibliotech Nationale. We need a tiny moment to acknowledge Joseph van Praet, book hero. He’d worked for the Duc collecting… can you imagine? This would suck so hard. He’s the apprentice for the Duc’s clerk, his librarian. Joseph van Praet’s younger, obviously. But they work for that Duc, collecting his library together, and then the Duc dies, and the daughter says, you know, I’m just not interested in this, turn it into cash, and they had to work it and sell it all off. That would be terrible. The two of them go and start working for the Bibliotech Royale, which even though it’s a royal library, the French kings had one moment of brilliance and said, we will allow the public to come in. In the 18th century, they create public reading rooms.

Anne Brannen  28:31 

On the other hand, there will be no bread Sorry about that part, but you can read.

Michelle Butler  30:02 

You can use it. It’s there. They’re allowing it to be a public service.

Anne Brannen  30:06 

Which saves it during the revolution. Of course. I love that. I did not know.

Michelle Butler  30:12 

But book hero Joseph van Praet, he’s in charge of the Bibliotech Nationale at that point–he’s not even French by the way, he’s Dutch–as things are getting worse and worse in the revolution and becoming the terror, the desire to do something terrible to the library is overriding–

Anne Brannen  30:32 

Sure. Because it’s probably a fancy building, is my guess. Have I been there? No, but I’m guessing, fancy building. They might even have a fancy tea room. Of course they’d going to burn it down. Burn it down.

Michelle Butler  30:46 

Yeah, there’s all this, we want to burn it down. He is very good at persuading and culling the ones that are actually, you know, we don’t need that one. So he says, you’re absolutely right. Here’s one that is the genealogy of this aristocrat you hate. Take that one out and burn it. But he saves the ones–

Anne Brannen  31:10 

Right.

Michelle Butler  31:11 

He doesn’t just hand them books willy-nilly. He decides which are the ones that can be–

Anne Brannen  31:18 

Burnt.

Michelle Butler  31:19 

Gotten rid of, you know, without too much loss. Anyway, he is so important in building the Bibliotech Nationale and he worked there until his death in 1831, that the private reading room, I’m quoting now “the private reading room in the rare book section of the National Library’s new Francois Mitterrand center is named for him.”

Anne Brannen  31:44 

So not only is he figuring out what books they can get rid of without, you know, completely destroying the integrity of the library, he’s also clearly making them sound like really good things to burn because they’re connected with the things which must be burnt, you know, and so they end up being really desirable burning objects. Because if you said, Oh, well, here’s a cookbook, that wouldn’t work. Although you could say, here’s a cookbook, which was owned by the cook of Marie Antoinette. You could do things like that, and then you would want to burn it, but you’d have to put them in context. You can’t just hand some stuff over.

Michelle Butler  32:28 

He’s a really important dude. He is protecting the books of the Bibliotech Nationale but also, with all of this chaos going on and aristocratic libraries being dispersed to the winds, he is gathering 1000s of the books and bringing them to the Bibliotech Nationale.

Anne Brannen  32:45 

How did he…? Okay, so the aristocrats at this time in France are in danger, very bad danger. So they get dragged off and their heads get cut off, and then their mansions their mansions get taken over?

Michelle Butler  33:03 

Right. But he had contacts where people would bring books to him. Pretty cool. So that’s two of the three copies. The prosecutor’s is in the Bibliotech Nationale, the copy found in the English bookstore is now in Vienna. The third copy is in the University of Edinburgh. It was not recognized for what it was until the late 19th century. 1888.

Anne Brannen  33:34 

Wow.

Michelle Butler  33:42 

Sorry, 1870 is when it was found.

Anne Brannen  33:46 

So it’s not one of the ones that had any effect on history.

Michelle Butler  33:49 

There is a possibility that it is Calvin’s own personal, because it matches–

Anne Brannen  33:54 

It’s hilariously ironic that it survives.

Michelle Butler  33:54 

The first 16 pages of the printed are gone and they’ve been replaced by a handwritten copy. He describes in letters having, in order to prove that Servetus, because he was living under an assumed name in Vienne.

Anne Brannen  34:22 

That’s right. That’s right. He was using that to prove his dreadfulness and so he needed to take it out.

Michelle Butler  34:28 

Right. So he sent both the printed–he slashed out the 16 pages and had the manuscript version that he’d been sent, and he sent them both to the authorities in France and said, look, it’s the same guy. So those those 16 pages had been replaced with a handwritten–not in his handwriting, a scribe’s handwriting. How it ended up there is kind of a hoot. In the 1690s, a young Scottish aristocrat named George Douglas, who was the son of the Duke of Queensberry, went on the tour– you’re supposed to go do your tour of the world. He and his tutor, Cunningham, went together. They spent so much money on books. They just hit every used bookstore that they could find.

Anne Brannen  35:26 

So this is one time that the grand tour that the rich and the nobles take actually seems like a good idea. Let’s go get books. Let’s go get books.

Michelle Butler  35:37 

Dad is having trouble at home, things are happening politically back at home, and he’s saying, ‘you know, you got to come home’ and they’re like, ‘oh, we can’t hear you.’

Anne Brannen  35:47 

‘I’m sorry. You’re breaking up.’

Michelle Butler  35:50 

They bought 800 books.

Anne Brannen  35:52 

Which clearly they did not carry around in their backpacks.

Michelle Butler  35:55 

No, they’re sending books home by the truckload.

Anne Brannen  36:00 

You know his dad was pissed. I need you here. I need him here. I need him here. And I’ve got this bunch of books instead. So one of them…but we don’t know where he got it.

Michelle Butler  36:11 

We don’t know. We don’t know where he got it.

Anne Brannen  36:15 

Somewhere in Europe.

Michelle Butler  36:17 

It could have been anywhere. They went to Strasburg, they went to Milan, they went to Florence. I mean, it really could have been anywhere. But somewhere among those 800 books was this one, that got packed up and went to Scotland. But tragically, young George, when he came home, got sick and he died. His father donated all of those books to the library at the University of Edinburgh in his honor.

Anne Brannen  36:47 

Well, that’s a good thing to have done with the books and it kept the books safe.

Michelle Butler  36:51 

The reason we know this is that it says in the book, it says it was donated in 1695 in honor of…

Anne Brannen  36:59 

So it really is deliciously ironic, because it’s not like it ended up in Scotland because of the connection to Calvin.

Michelle Butler  37:07 

It just a Scottish boy and his book loving teacher with a blank check wandering through Europe.

Anne Brannen  37:15 

Probably didn’t even know what it was. Do you think he did?

Michelle Butler  37:17 

No, they didn’t know what it was. ‘Oh, this looks old. Here, send that home.’

Anne Brannen  37:25 

‘Along with the Chaucer, that’d be good.’ My, my. Thank you.

Michelle Butler  37:28 

I have some contemporary works for you. There’s this book, of course, from 2002. Everybody shows up in Servetus’ story. Voltaire loves him. One of the doctors who helped found Johns Hopkins loves him. He’s one of the guys was really instrumental in making sure that Servetus gets credit for the pulmonary circulation idea. There was a play in 1909–I can’t find it–but when that statue was installed–

The statue that the French Nazis burned.

Somebody wrote a play. I cannot find it. The book that I read said it was dreadful. “While this was going on, the town fathers of Vienne, not to be outdone, decided to erect their own monument to Servetus to be unveiled in August 1909. The town even sponsored the production of a particularly awful, overwrought play called ‘Michel Servet: episode dramatique in deaux acts and verse.”  So it’s 2 acts, in verse. I’m sure it’s wonderful. I cannot find it. I looked. It’s not on the internet. Not yet. I can’t even find it on the Internet Archive, but you know, drama is ephemeral. I can find confirmation that it existed but I can’t find the text of it. There is another play from 2008.

Anne Brannen  39:00 

No. No.

Michelle Butler  39:01 

I’m not even kidding you. That appears to be–if I have found the right person–by a neuro behavioral researcher at the University of Montreal who appears to, as a side gig, write plays about famous scientists, because he has one about Galileo and one about Kepler.

Anne Brannen  39:25 

That’s a really good hobby. Were you able to find this one?

Michelle Butler  39:30 

Those ones I can find.

Anne Brannen  39:33 

Is it a play that you would wish to go see?

Michelle Butler  39:37 

Pieces. The one about Servetus is also about Vesalius, this other medical student. When Servetus was a medical student at the University of Paris, he and this other dude Vesalius worked together as teaching assistants during the dissections. They kind of were friends. Vesalius goes on to be a really famous physician. So the play traces the two of them and then Calvin off in Geneva, and then the getting together when Servetus comes and they argue. There’s pieces of it that are not bad. There’s a weird subplot around whoring that I don’t understand that doesn’t involve either of them.

Anne Brannen  40:25 

Around what? 

Michelle Butler  40:25 

Around going to sex workers.

Anne Brannen  40:27 

Whoring is what you said.

Michelle Butler  40:28 

I did.

Anne Brannen  40:29 

It was so out of context that I didn’t think I’d heard the word right.

Michelle Butler  40:34 

I also found it…I mean, if you had made me take a quiz about what I was expecting to find in a play about Servetus and Vesalius, I would not have guessed there was a whole subplot about whoring.

Anne Brannen  40:47 

And neither one of them are going to be–

Michelle Butler  40:52 

Involved, no. It’s not them, it’s some fellow students. So I don’t understand that. But the actual conversation between Calvin and Servetus is pretty good. If I had been the editor, I would have said more of that. Give me more of that.

Anne Brannen  41:07 

Well, maybe–I’m still on the sex workers–do the two doctors have things to say? Do they theology about the prostitutes? Do they react to it? Maybe it’s in there to show who they are, you know, telling their fellow students ‘don’t go visit the sex workers’ or something.

Michelle Butler  41:31 

There is kind of a thing about, ‘well, you’re getting in trouble for this, what were you expecting?’

Anne Brannen  41:41 

You could get in trouble for a lot of things.

Michelle Butler  41:44 

The conversation…I really would have liked more of the play to focus on this. We have this really nice scene where they’re talking. Servetus says,  “Is it you on my last day on earth? You are the first to visit me yet I cannot bid you welcome.” That’s kind of nice.

Anne Brannen  42:07 

Yeah, that’s nicely done.

Michelle Butler  42:09 

Calvin says, “As a Paris student, I hazarded my life for you.” Servetus: “But yet we failed to meet.” Calvin says, “My letters peaceably admonished you.”  Servetus says, “Which I dismissed.” Calvin says, “What more can we know? If you persist in false and heinous opinions, embrace death in this world and the next.” Servetus replies, “Confident flesh quavers without fainting.” So this scene I actually really like. The rest of it, I’m like, what the heck. But this scene–this is act five, scene three–is pretty good. And I will have you know there is an opera from–

Anne Brannen  42:49 

No. From when?

Michelle Butler  42:54 

2011.

Anne Brannen  42:56 

Oh my God. I don’t think it’s come to the Santa Fe Opera. I haven’t seen anything.

Michelle Butler  43:02 

I cannot find anything about it except for the announcement that it happened.

Anne Brannen  43:08 

Where was that?

Michelle Butler  43:09 

Weirdly, it was in Geneva.

Anne Brannen  43:12 

So Geneva has kind of gotten over the whole thing about the embarrassment of having–

Michelle Butler  43:17 

It’s The Trial of Michel Servette: a New Opera, written by composer Shauna Beesley and libretto by John-Claude Humbert at the Salle Centrale Madeleine in 204 Geneva.

Anne Brannen  43:29 

I can see how it would make a good opera.

Michelle Butler  43:32 

I think it would make a great opera. But I was surprised. I should just always know to look for an opera. Always look for an opera. I was not expecting there to be quite this much pop culture about this. Although I will say that I think that, as that one scene in that play shows, having the two of them in the room talking is absolutely a place where you can get good drama.

Anne Brannen  44:04 

Yeah. And you had told me–in the piece that you just read, Calvin mentions this–you told me that they were both at the University of Paris at the same time.

Michelle Butler  44:15 

Yes, they were and they knew each other.

Anne Brannen  44:17 

Oh, they did know each other.

Michelle Butler  44:18 

They did know each other. Ignatius Loyola was there at the same time too. But they did not know him because they ran in different circles. Yeah, it was really interesting. They knew each other at the University of Paris. They had agreed to get together and debate because they were fussing with each other and they had agreed to get together and debate but Servetus doesn’t show up. He’s apparently concerned that…see, at that point, his star was higher than Calvin’s because he had  released a book to great acclaim and Calvin’s first book had kind of bombed. So he must have decided he just didn’t need to show up and do this. Yeah, it’s real interesting. They have these repeated contacts over the course of their lives that end up in 1553 ending in tragedy.

Anne Brannen  45:12 

There’s a whole another sort of layer to what Calvin’s doing. Because he’s basically…he’s turned on someone that he knows.

Michelle Butler  45:25 

I would not say they ever liked each other, but they knew each other. The University of Paris though. Can you imagine? Servetus and Calvin and Ignatius Loyola.

Anne Brannen  45:36 

It’s a hot place for all kinds of thinking.

Michelle Butler  45:39 

Oh, I forgot to tell you this. The book is so expensive, right? People know it existed and they can’t find copies of it. So in 1721, there is an enterprising publisher, Georg Serpilius who creates…they’re kind of forged editions. They’re a reprint of the original book, but he’s trying to make them look as if they’re from 1553.

Anne Brannen  46:10 

Oh, really? Instead of just saying ‘reprint,’ which would be good enough. 

Michelle Butler  46:18 

Yes.

Anne Brannen  46:19 

But you could get more money if you could convince people that you’ve had an old one that had somehow survived the flames?

Michelle Butler  46:26 

Yes. I’ll just quote this because it’s kind of amusing. “They were intended to be all but indistinguishable from the originals. And they were, except for Serpilius’ inexplicable use of single rather than double dash on the title page.” Sorry, pause for a second. You can actually tell the difference because the typeface is different and stuff but unless you have them sitting beside each other, you’re not necessarily going to be able to tell.

Anne Brannen  46:53 

Which you wouldn’t have them sitting next to each other if you were one of the people wanting to buy them because there weren’t any copies.

Michelle Butler  46:59 

“Reprints hot in hand, Serpilius then contacted book collectors and prominent Unitarians and told them that he had heard of the existence of extremely rare books by the Spanish heretic, Michael Servetus, and that he was willing to act as a middleman if the collector wished to purchase them. If the collector agreed, Serpilius sold the reprints as originals. Since the counterfeits were not discovered for some years, and there is no record of Serpilius ever been caught, the scam seems to have been successful.” I do not know how many of these survive.

Anne Brannen  47:42 

When it is that they figured out that he was selling that he had been selling?

Michelle Butler  47:47 

I do not know when this was uncovered.

Anne Brannen  47:52 

Because we don’t know who he sold them to.

Michelle Butler  47:55 

I didn’t go tracking down how many of those existed.

Anne Brannen  48:00 

That is very interesting. You couldn’t nowadays get away with that because the book collectors are connected to each other throughout the world. You can send information so quickly. So you wouldn’t be able to do that. People would want to know the provenance. And then they check on it. They’d send a picture of the title page to their friend in Edinburgh, and they would say no.

Michelle Butler  48:28 

And you’d be able to date the ink and date the paper and everything.

Anne Brannen  48:34 

But it was an interesting and well thought out scam for its time. Well, thank you.

Michelle Butler  48:42 

This was wild. I enjoyed this research.

Anne Brannen  48:45 

Well, that is our discussion about Michael Servetius, who was murdered by being burnt at the stake illegally in Geneva, because Calvin thought it was a good idea and a bunch of other people too. To be fair, somebody was going to burn him at the stake at some point. Unless he had been better at running. He just wasn’t good at being incognito.

Michelle Butler  48:49 

He’s exhibit A as to why if Christopher Marlowe had not actually been killed, we would know.

Anne Brannen  49:22 

Christopher Marlowe did not survive and go hide out someplace. Because if he had, we would have so much work that he wrote.

Constitutionally incapable of not. 

‘My name’s Billy Watkins, and I’ve written a play.’ And everyone would go, ‘God, this reads just like Marlowe.’ No, there’s nothing like this. This isn’t happening. Servertius did indeed die also and three copies of his work survived. Maybe more. Everybody, go look in your attic. Make sure you don’t have any that are in Latin. The next time that you hear from us, we are going to go to Crimea because we want to talk about the slave trade in Crimea. Michelle, when is that? When is the time period for that?

Michelle Butler  50:08 

Late medieval. So 14th, 15th century. That was one of the other reasons I wanted to put it on the list because that’s kind of late.

Anne Brannen  50:15 

It is. Yeah, I think of medieval slavery and I’m mostly thinking about Vikings. I mean, it continues because it’s a thing, but waves of it. Yeah. So we’re gonna go to Crimea. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today only with less technology. We can be found at Spotify and Apple podcast and other places where the podcasts are hanging out. That’s where we are. You can reach us at Truecrimemedieval.com, Truecrimemedieval is all one word. You can leave comments, and find show notes and transcriptions and links to the podcast. You can write you can write to us, you can give us suggestions about…if you’ve got any medieval crimes that you think maybe we don’t know about, you should let us know. Yes, let’s go to Crimea next time. Bye.

Michelle Butler  51:20 

Bye.

90. The Jacquerie Smashes Property, France 1358

Anne Brannen  0:21 

Hello, and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:31 

And I’m Michelle Butler, in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:34 

Today–we’re really excited about this because this was a lot of fun for us. I don’t know, it may be, Michelle, that whenever something is a lot of fun for us, it’s really not much fun for anybody else.

Michelle Butler  0:46 

It’s possible.

Anne Brannen  0:47 

But we don’t know, do we, and we’re gonna go on with this. Because we’re going to talk about the Jacquerie, the French peasants revolt in 1358. When the French peasants terrorize the nobility, mostly in the Oise valley. That’s where it started in France. 1358. It’s all famous and everything. We talked about the English peasants revolt, which happens, oh, like, what 30 years later?

Michelle Butler  1:18 

The English revolt is in 1381, and this is 1358.

Anne Brannen  1:24 

The Jacquerie started in May of 1358 when some peasants in St Leu massacred some noblemen and their families, and continued for a few months until the nobility managed to massacre them in retaliation, and brought some measure of order back, though many peasants left the area. The name Jacquerie comes down in history. We call peasant revolts everywhere ‘jacqueries.’ So you can find things like the jacquerie of Ukraine, the jacquerie of Russia, Japan, Korea. If there’s any kind of little peasant revolt, big or small, it’s a jacquerie. But the name itself comes from jacques, which was what the commoners used as armor. it’s a name, but also jacques–like, our word jacket. That’s where it comes from.

Michelle Butler  2:14 

Hmmm!

Anne Brannen  2:16 

I knew you’d love that. The commoners used it as armor. It’s a padded quilted jacket, which bizarrely–I was surprised to find this out–it really was pretty good at keeping arrows from coming through, even heavy ones. It’s not as good as metal armor, but, you know, it’s better than you would think. So that’s what the peasants wore. The jacques. And they were called jacques. It’s the name for peasants. Alright. So what the hell what happened? Where are we? Why did this happen? The jacquerie get presented from about the time the revolt is suppressed to really a few years ago, as if it’s something that happened out of nowhere. It just like it was out of the blue, no discernible reason. Peasants, they just went nuts. They became barbaric savages. They were indeed sort of barbaric during the revolt, but they weren’t acting without reason. As usual, there’s a background to this, which was kind of getting ignored by everybody, especially the French nobility completely ignored what the background was. So I will now tell you all the background of the Jacquerie. There’s a lot of it, let me tell you. First of all, the revolt comes about 40 years after the Great Famine of 1315 to 1317, which decimated the population of Europe, and five years after the end of the Black Death, which further decimated the populace of Europe. One of the effects of having a fewer number of people at that time was that there were not enough commoners to do the work needed to keep the feudal system going. We noticed that we don’t have one now, do we? So it meant both that work was harder, and kind of conversely that the commoners had more freedom because they were more in demand. But this sort of wasn’t true in France. They were just kind of being overworked. It was also the middle of the Hundred Years War between England and France, which had started in 1337, 20 years previously, and it was going to continue on and off until 1453. Joan of Arc doesn’t show up until the fifteenth century–she’s not coming for a while. So Joan of Arc has nothing to do with the Jacquerie. Though the war was between England and France, all of the land battles took place on French soil. So all the depredations happened there, and more than two years before the uprising, the King of France had been captured in one of these Hundred Years wars, by Edward the Black Prince who was the son of Edward the third who was being the king of England at that time. He was captured at the Battle of Poitier. So the country had been being governed for a couple of years by the Dauphin, who was acting as regent. He’s going to be Charles the fifth later, but he’s just a prince right now. With advice and some supposed help from the top general. It doesn’t really act like the English parliament–it’s more advisory. Doesn’t really get to do a whole lot of stuff. But it tells you things and has opinions. Charles had raised the taxes in order to strengthen the military, because, of coursse, he had a war, didn’t he, and his dad had been captured by England. The nobility, of course, didn’t like this because they don’t want to pay more taxes, and they got divided. Some were favoring the king of Navarre as a claimant to the throne. Besides their disunity, the nobles had also not been really behaving really well as soldiers. At the beginning of the century, the French nobles had been massacred by the Flemish at the Battle of the Golden Spurs, which though it had taken place 50 years before, was an infamous battle and very much in people’s minds. Since the Hundred Years War started, England was winning. I mean, England was winning all the stuff. The King had been captured the Battle of Poitiers and the understanding was that the nobles had let the King be captured because they panicked. Just as in the Battle of the Golden Spurs, the nobles had run. I mean, many of them were killed, but they had left and let the infantry, which was commoners, be slaughtered. Oh, by the way, spoiler alert, the English win most of the battles for quite a while in the Hundred Years War, but they don’t actually win them at the end, do they? Which is why when you go to Aquitaine, you are in France and not England. Haha, they lost, okay. You remember also that the taxes had been raised. That meant that the nobles wanted the peasants to be even more productive because they needed more money, so they could give more money to the king for the military, which they weren’t being very good in. Even though the population had been diminished, so there should have been more availability of land and therefore movement of the lower classes, one of the things going on was that the land in France was connected to status. The nobles kept their land, you know, even through all these time and the peasants were stuck, and the nobles wanted more out of them. And then the money went to the military, and the military kept getting defeated. It was all really disheartening. But there’s more. Because the battles in the aforementioned Hundred Years War happened in France, and the French kept mostly losing, mercenaries and various ruffians the English had hired to fight, if they stayed there, or when the English didn’t need them anymore, they were fired and so they were still around. So what they did all, of the mercenaries that had been fighting for the English, they were roaming around Northern France and robbing people and plundering and raping and basically being completely uncontrolled. Since feudalism was supposedly only fair to the peasants because they could count on the nobles, whose land they were working and for whom they were making all this money, in terms of grain, the nobles protected them, didn’t they, but then the nobles kind of weren’t, were they? They were just not living up to their side of the military bargain. They mostly made things worse. Okay. That’s my background. Do you have anything to add to the background? I think I got it all. Do you think I got it all?

Michelle Butler  9:13 

This thing that I didn’t know about, until I was reading this, is how bad the Battle of Poitiers was.

Anne Brannen  9:23 

Oh, so bad.

Michelle Butler  9:24 

It was so bad. On the English side of things we always hear about Agincourt–

Anne Brannen  9:29 

Yes we do.

Michelle Butler  9:30 

–because it’s become such a big piece of how England understands itself.

Anne Brannen  9:37 

They won the battle of Poitiers too, but it’s not, I don’t know.

Michelle Butler  9:41 

They did, but it didn’t become this piece of their self-mythologizing. So I did not know how bad, or if I’d known I’d forgotten. The French king was captured and so many of the nobles were were killed, and it had this huge, huge impact on how the French understood themselves. The non-nobles had a legitimate grievance here about being not only not protected when you have all of these armies stealing from them. They’re replenishing their supplies by stealing from the non-nobles. I think that’s a legitimate thing to be upset about.

Anne Brannen  10:27 

Yeah, yeah. Both the French had been losing stuff and that the these battles in which the nobles basically turn tail and run, you know, they’re getting slaughtered, but they also abandoned the king.

Michelle Butler  10:41 

The French king had sent home…some of the non-nobles had gotten a group together, ‘hey, we’re here to help.’ He’s like, ‘go home. It’s not your job to fight. And anyway, we’ll do so much better of a job than you.’

Anne Brannen  10:54 

‘An account of being noble.’ Yeah. ‘Because we’re like, hot stuff.’ All right. That’s our background. We go on to our Jacquerie in May of 1358. There were some peasants who met together in St Leu to discuss their political and economic situation. Their target consisted specifically of nine noblemen who had been sent to garrison a castle, which was meant to be used to attack Paris. What’s going on there? Another little revolt. Etienne Marcel, who was a revolutionary leader from the town, held Paris after having had a coup against the crown. So that’s what was going on. Paris was being held by revolutionaries. The Jacquerie killed the nine noblemen in sympathy with Paris, where they said they killed nobles, you know, and then the revolt spread. They continued to support Paris, but their objective pretty much was to destroy the nobility, which held money and military and wasn’t doing any good with either one of them. The idea that there was actually reasoning behind the Jacquerie, and there was organization–this is a fairly new idea. So we are completely impressed with Justine Firnhaber-Baker. She’s a professor at St. Andrews? Do you remember? I think it’s St. Andrews.

Michelle Butler  12:25 

I know when the book was published, and who published it.

Anne Brannen  12:28 

Well, I know the 2021. Who published it?

Michelle Butler  12:31 

Oxford.

Anne Brannen  12:33 

In 2021, she published the first book, The Jacquerie, since the first one, which had been written in 1859.

Michelle Butler  12:41 

You are correct. She’s at the University of St. Andrews.

Anne Brannen  12:43 

St. Andrews. Yeah. It’s wonderful. It’s a matter of going back and looking at the archives and the records, and figuring out what happened. She says at one point that it’s actually difficult to figure out what happened because the sources are so sketchy. One of the things that hadn’t occurred to me was that with the English peasants’ revolt, we have writing from the side of the peasants revolt itself. We have stuff. Nothing from the Jacquerie. It’s all from chronicles that, almost all of them, were written some time after. One is closer, but there’s still been some buffer time. The chronicles are the ones that tell us there was atrocities and there was barbarism, and there was no reason for any of this, blah, blah, blah. It’s the medieval chronicles that tell us that. 

Michelle Butler  12:43 

They’re sympathizing with their patrons.

Anne Brannen  12:50 

They sure as hell are. But one of the things also that we have are the remissions. Later, when there’s an amnesty, we have it all written down when people are being pardoned and whatnot. So we kind of know what it was, which pretty much was not anything that the medieval chroniclers said. So it’s extremely recently that scholars have been talking about it as a political revolt rather than some spontaneous barbaric fury, which is really how the French nobles looked at it because there was no reason for the peasants to be unhappy, obviously, since they were peasants and the nobles weren’t. There you go. So it was prominently chronicle. There was a lot of writing about it in the histories, The medieval chronicles focus on the atrocities and the barbarism, but the peasants in the Jacquerie did massacre some nobles when they found them. The chronicles present the Jacquerie as irrational and the nobles as terrified. There’s no political context for the uprising in the chronicles, but they were not a mob. They had military organization–they had captains, they had lieutenants. They were violent. This is absolutely true. But the accusations of atrocities are actually not backed up by the archival evidence. It looks like there was a fear of noblewomen being raped, for instance, rather than noblewomen actually being raped. The story of the Jacques roasting a nobleman on a spit in front of his children and his wife does seem to have some evidence. But that’s it. They killed noblemen, they killed women, and it looks like it amounted to about 20 people. But they were scary to the nobles. What they were doing–what they really did–was they were very violent against property. That’s what they were. They attacked houses and fortresses and castles and towers, and they destroyed them and whatever was in them. They didn’t loot them. They did not loot them. They destroyed the stuff that was in them. So they were not going around raping. There was always stories of gang rape and it was not happening. All these stories of massacres of noblemen…they did indeed kill some people. But they did not do what the stories have come down to us. This is fascinating to me.

Michelle Butler  16:14 

I really appreciated her discussion of the role of Charles of Navarre.

Anne Brannen  16:20 

Oh, Charles of Navarre, yes. Because he was a claimant to the throne and mortal enemy of the Dauphin and the Dauphin’s father. I’m about to say what he did. Yes.

Michelle Butler  16:32 

That was pretty fascinating.

Anne Brannen  16:34 

You’ll probably be adding some stuff. So this revolt happened, and it got suppressed, didn’t it, it is not still going on, it got stopped. It was suppressed when the Dauphin allied with Charles of Navarre, as we were just saying, who was the other claimant to the throne, and they lead a company of nobles at Mello. In June, they invited the leader of the Jacquerie–his name was William Cale–they invited him to truce talks, and then they tortured him to death and cut his head off because they said that he wasn’t their equal and so the laws of chivalry didn’t apply to him.  Because generally you’re not supposed to invite people to a truce talk and then kill them. That’s really bad manners and goes against the chivalric code. You remember that one of the William de Braoses did that to Seisyll ap Dyfnwal? Yeah. ‘Come to a peace talk.’ Then he shut the doors and killed everybody. So they killed him because he foolishly believed that they were going to treat him as a military equal. No, no. At that point, the peasant army fell apart and the knights slaughtered them. At the same time at the town of Meaux, Etienne Marcel led a troop of armed commoners from out of Paris–bourgeois from Paris–to support the uprising. The town of Meaux took them in– took the rebels in, they were very hospitable, but that Gaston Phebus…did you read about him? Because he’s fascinating.

Michelle Butler  18:07 

I don’t think so. I was trying to hunt down stuff about the spice merchant.

Anne Brannen  18:11 

You were on the spice merchant? I didn’t get to that. Gaston Phebus. He’s one of the few people we know of who actually gave themselves their own nickname and it stuck. He gives himself the nickname Phebus–Apollo, the sun–this is after he has been in one of the crusades against Prussia because, you know, Russians weren’t being Christian enough. Any rate, he gave himself that name.  Phebus came back with a force of lancers and came toward the town. While he was coming, the nobles who were being besieged in the fortress, they took heart because, you know, literally the cavalry was coming. They burned up a bunch of townsmen in a town nearby and they hang the mayor along with some other important townsmen, and then they set fire to the town. The town burned for quite some time, two weeks or something. Then they went out in the countryside, and they killed all the peasants they could find. For two more months, towns that had sheltered the Jacquerie fought back against the noble forces and the peasants got all slaughtered. The gist of all this is that the nobles who put down the revolution were much, much, much more brutal than the peasants were. Here’s us not being surprised. And it’s from their point of view that the story is told. The reason they had to suppress this at all was that the peasants had been being so badly behaved. So the Dauphin declared amnesty at the end of the two months and he put heavy fines on all the places where the Jacquerie had been supported–more money for the crown. But his letter of amnesty condemned the nobles’ violence as much as the peasants’. So I actually have some good feelings about that. So at that point in time, they knew. That disappears. And though the remissions list the crimes, the infamous atrocities are just simply not in there. Now, there’s a wonderful annotated map of incidents in the Jacquerie, which is online. It’s one of the Google Maps. I could not find the name of the user who put it together. You can click on things, you can see where all the damage was done, and who did what. We’ll put the link in the show notes. Did you run across that?

Michelle Butler  20:43 

You’ll have to send that to me.

Anne Brannen  20:45 

I’ll send it to you.

Michelle Butler  20:46 

So I can put that in the show notes. Because yeah, I didn’t find that.

Anne Brannen  20:49 

It’s wonderful. Yeah, there’s no atrocities. The Jacquerie had no political impact on France. It changed nothing structural. It did nothing to help the peasants or make their lives easier. What it did was it terrorized the nobility, and it caused them to have, you know, very, very horrible fantasies about what was happening, what the peasants were doing to them. That was its impact. Its impact was a legend of the atrocities committed by the barbarous peasants for no reason. If the nobles learned anything at all from this, was it that we should perhaps treat the peasants better? Or maybe we shouldn’t take so much money from them? Or, I don’t know, maybe we should, like, do some military exercises and become better soldiers? The only thing they learned was that the peasants were dangerous. That did lead to some things, as castle reinforcements and, you know, making structures safer against the peasants. But the term ‘Jacquerie’ for the revolt didn’t come into general usage until the French Revolution. Since then, it’s remained as a label for bloody and brutal peasant rebellions. The noble suppression was much more bloody and brutal than the Jacquerie. What were you going to tell me about Charles of Navarre?

Michelle Butler  22:14 

I enjoyed her discussion of him because he really is just a force of chaos in this.

Anne Brannen  22:23 

Was it his idea to slaughter all the peasants?

Michelle Butler  22:27 

He’s king of this independent country that is between France and Spain. Navarre is part of northern Spain and it was its own standalone country at this point. He encourages the peasant uprising until it’s in his best interest to switch sides, because it’s causing problems for the Dauphin. So he’s encouraging this, and he’s got his own mercenaries that he’s brought back and he’s put up in some of his empty castles, and they’re out also causing problems.

Anne Brannen  23:04 

Of course they are.

Michelle Butler  23:07 

He is working from the assumption that the more problems he can cause in France, the better for him, because that’s lighting fires that the Dauphin has to try to put out. Until it becomes in his best interest to turn on this and put it down. What a rat bastard. One of the novels that I found calls him Charles the wicked. 

Anne Brannen  23:29 

I like that.

Michelle Butler  23:30 

I’m not going to argue with that as a way of understanding him.

Anne Brannen  23:35 

He never did become king of France, by the way, in case anybody was wondering. So my understanding, Michelle, is that you were able to find many things that you were excited about.

Michelle Butler  23:46 

Oh my gosh.

Anne Brannen  23:47 

Popular treatment of the Jacquerie episode of French medieval history.

Michelle Butler  23:53 

I did. I did not find as much as I would have liked to have found about the historical personage who was a spice merchant from Montpelier.

Anne Brannen  24:04 

What spice merchant? What are you talking about?

Michelle Butler  24:06 

His name was Pierre Gilles.

Anne Brannen  24:08 

Gilles

Michelle Butler  24:08 

Gilles. He was a spice merchant, and he becomes a rebel commander who works with the other one that you just mentioned.

Anne Brannen  24:20 

William Cale.

Michelle Butler  24:21 

And there’s another one who was a Hospitaler.

Anne Brannen  24:24 

Oh, really? So one of the knight-monk orders…somebody from the morders was in on this.

Michelle Butler  24:34 

I wanted to find out more about that, but I didn’t. So there we go.

Anne Brannen  24:41 

Yes and now I want to know, did he ever adulterate the saffron? We refer you to our previous podcast on saffron. Don’t adulterate it in Nuremberg in the Middle Ages, because it’s a deathly thing to do.

Michelle Butler  24:55 

Not surprisingly, the Jacquerie was quite a spur to the imagination throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century, actually.

Anne Brannen  25:05 

Oh, really?

Michelle Butler  25:07 

In French, in English, in Italian, and in Spanish.

Anne Brannen  25:12 

Oh, lovely.

Michelle Butler  25:14 

I have stuff in all four of those languages. There’s a novel from 1842, which I think is in three pieces. You can find it, like Volume One, Volume Two, Volume Three, but I was looking at it online–because it’s so far out of print, you know, it’s legal for it to be scanned and be online. So that’s where I was looking at it. The premise of this one–this one is called The Jacquerie, or The Lady and the Page: An Historical Romance by GPR James, and it’s from 1842. So that’s pretty early.

Anne Brannen  25:46 

I saw that, and the fact that it was an historical romance caused me to believe that I did not want to read it.

Michelle Butler  25:55 

It was interesting to me to look at the different ones and see where the sympathy of the book is.

Anne Brannen  26:01 

Is it ever with the Jacquerie?

Michelle Butler  26:03 

Yes, sometimes, but not this one. This one has a French soldier, who had been fighting as a mercenary in Germany, arrive back home in the middle of the Jacquerie, and his sympathy is immediately with the poor murdered nobles against the senseless brutality of the peasants.

Anne Brannen  26:21 

Were there atrocities? They wouldn’t be described. But they might be mentioned.

Michelle Butler  26:25 

Oh, yes.

Anne Brannen  26:26 

‘Done in ways that I cannot now speak of’–that kind of thing.

Michelle Butler  26:30 

Definitely atrocities. He’s in the inn, and the priest says to him, haven’t you heard? And he says, No. The priest says, well, here’s what’s going on. He says, holy cow, tell me who I need to kill. So that’s all the further I read in that.

Anne Brannen  26:50 

Yeah, I think I can miss this. Thank you for looking at it so that I don’t have to read it. What else did you find?

Michelle Butler  26:58 

There is one from 1888. This is in also in English, called Before the Dawn: A Story of Paris and the Jacquerie. kery. It was published under a pseudonym, but it’s by George Perkings. This one actually is sympathetic to the peasants. It has wonderful purple prose. Oh my gosh, I have to share this with you. Here we go. You ready?

Anne Brannen  27:30 

Lay it on me.

Michelle Butler  27:30 

This book starts with:  “Afort the distance of several leagues from Paris, on the edge of the forest of Errmonne, stood a cottage built of logs, turf, and clay, a miserable dwelling, the home of a peasant, that is to say, of a despised creature, a wretch derisively called Jacques Bonhomme. Let us enter. We see a rude table formed of slabs, two stools on which are seated a man and a woman, a heap of straw in one corner serving for a bed, and a hearth upon which smolders a feeble fire, whose smoke escapes as best it may through an open hole in the roof. On the clay floor are crouched three or four small children with wan, pinched faces for hunger is here, here within easy reach of the game that crowds the forest. What prevents the miserable wretch from taking his bow and shooting one of the deer that come fearlessly to his very door? From snaring the hares that frisk about in the neighboring thickets? What compels him to endure the sight of his famishing children who stretch out their hands and ask for food? This prevents him–Death or his right hand stricken off, if he is detected in the act of killing the game that belongs to the nobles.” So this one, this book is very sympathetic to the peasants. Now, it’s this very stereotypical 19th century understanding of what it means to be a medieval peasant. You can see this kind of Robin Hood-y understanding of the world, but this is actually William Callat–we find out in the next paragraph–who becomes a leader of it, and you have this justification. His children are starving. So what are you going to do?

Anne Brannen  29:18 

The idea that there was a justification is floating around that early.

Michelle Butler  29:23 

1888. That wasn’t as purpley when I was reading it out loud, but it’s pretty purpley.

Anne Brannen  29:28 

What is the name of this author?

Michelle Butler  29:30 

This is called Before the Dawn: A story of Paris and the Jacquerie. Let me go back a page. The book was published under the name George Dulac, but that was a pseudonym for George Perkings. It was published in New York and London by Putnam. This is probably my favorite of the ones I found because I like how he really wants to present this as sympathetic, but it’s kind of over the top about it. How do you not know how many children are crouching on the ground? Three or four? This is not an area in which there should be–

Anne Brannen  30:09 

The room is too small to lose them.

Michelle Butler  30:12 

What do you mean, three or four small children? This is a place you can be precise.

Anne Brannen  30:18 

I like the smoke going out the roof, ‘as best it may’ as if it has agency. ‘I’m going this way, guys.’

Michelle Butler  30:26 

Everything about this house is dreadful. It’s all dreadful.

Anne Brannen  30:29 

I wanted to know what else he wrote, but I’m not seeing it. All I’m seeing is Before the Dawn.

Michelle Butler  30:34 

The next one that I found was written in French originally and then was translated in 1906. It’s called The Iron Trevet; or, Jocelyn the champion, a Tale of the Jacquerie. This is the one that calls him Charles the wicked. This one is really interesting because it shows the emergence of the uprising and its sympathies are with the peasants, and one of the justifications given for it is droit de seigneur.

Anne Brannen  31:04 

Oh, no, no, no, no. That thing that doesn’t exist. God. So this thing that doesn’t exist has been just grafted on to this legendary story.

Michelle Butler  31:15 

Yes. This is fascinating because it has William Callet, the same guy who’s the rebel leader, who is also the protagonist of the previous one. This one has this whole made up story with William Callet’s daughter, having been droit de seigneur’ed.

Now you have to, just in case somebody who’s listening is not remembering or not catching what that is, you have to explain droit de seigneur.

I’ll just read you a little couple sentences because it’s clear in here. “She was affianced to a miller lad, a vassal like herself. By reason of the goodness of his disposition, he was called Maserek the Lambkin” –so her fiance is so gentle, he’s called Lambkin.

Anne Brannen  32:03 

Ohh!

Michelle Butler  32:05 

“The day of their marriage was set, but in these days, the wife’s first night belongs to her seigneur, the nobles call it the Night of First Fruits.” We talked about this in an April Fool’s Day episode, the idea that you have to sleep with the lord, you have to give your virginity to the lord. I was just flipping through this book and was like, wait a second, hold up. There it is. On page 121. Yes.

Anne Brannen  32:34 

So this is a French book. And it’s sympathetic to the jacques.

Michelle Butler  32:40 

Yeah. There’s a 1961 novel called A Walk with Love and Death that was made into a movie in 1968. The movie is really fascinating, because it’s trying to piggyback on the success of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet.

Anne Brannen  32:58 

Oh. Oh.

Michelle Butler  33:00 

The novel is essentially a story of starcrossed lovers, so it doesn’t need to be set during the Jacquerie. That’s just a useful backdrop and providing an excuse for this nobleman’s daughter to meet up with a poor scholar on the run from the violence in Paris. John Houston is the director, and what’s really fascinating about this film, retrospectively, if you’re a fan of the Addams Family, is that one of the reasons he did this movie is that it was a vehicle for his daughter, Angelica. It was her first big screen role.

Anne Brannen  33:37 

It was her first big screen role.

Michelle Butler  33:39 

But it’s rough. It really is like Romeo and Juliet. They try to run away together, but everybody abandons them, there’s no protection from the lords, it’s very dangerous to be out and about. They take refuge in a monastery the the monks abandon them–they take off to go be safe somewhere else, and they leave them there.

Anne Brannen  34:05 

Well, you know, there’s been this whole theme of people getting abandoned by the nobles in battle, so I kind of like seeing that this theme of abandonment is going on through the 1961 movie. That’s good.

Michelle Butler  34:18 

After they get abandoned by the monks, they marry themselves in the church in the monaster and are waiting for…you can hear the mob coming.

Yes, the mob that’s full of atrocities-making.

And gonna kill them for no good reason.

Anne Brannen  34:41 

Because, you know, they’re alive.

Michelle Butler  34:45 

I would not say that one has sympathy with the peasants, but really, they’re just there to provide a threat.

Anne Brannen  34:53 

It doesn’t really examine the peasants either, because the peasants are just simply a kind of plot tool getting moved around.

Michelle Butler  35:02 

There’s two operas.

Anne Brannen  35:04 

I knew about one. I did not know about the other. When were these done?

Michelle Butler  35:08 

1894 and 1919. One is for sure in Italian, and I think the other one is in Spanish. There’s a play in Spanish, and that’s really early. I didn’t dig into this very far because I can’t find a translation of it, and my Spanish isn’t that fabulous. But there’s a book called The Plays of Clara Gazul, who was a Spanish comedian, and one of her plays is about theJacquerie.

Anne Brannen  35:44 

Okay. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Because the Jacquerie is hilarious.

Michelle Butler  35:51 

I have no idea, I’m telling you. I don’t even know for certain it’s about the French Jacquerie. So I’m giving you this one with a giant asterix.

Anne Brannen  36:00 

Oh, because it might be about any number of various jacqueries.

Michelle Butler  36:02 

I’m throwing it in here because it’s so early. It’s from 1825. Well, that book is from 1825. Anybody who wants to go figuring out what it is, be my guest because it’s entirely in Spanish and I was not able to locate a translation of it. But it’s fascinating. I said to you that all I needed now was a Finnish death metal song. I didn’t find that. But I did find that there is a German progressive rock band from 1965 that has a concept album called Power in the Passion, and it does take part of it in France in 1358, with the Jacquerie being important, so I feel like I scored the entire spectrum.

Anne Brannen  36:52 

I think, frankly, that a German experimental rock concept album is equal to a Finnish heavy metal album. What was his name? Christopher Lloyd? Who was it that did the heavy metal album that we were talking about?

Michelle Butler  37:06 

Oh, um, no, that’s not Christopher Lloyd…shoot, what is his name? He played Saruman…Christopher Lee.

Anne Brannen  37:19 

So Christopher Lee didn’t have an album about this?

Michelle Butler  37:23 

Not as far as I can tell. There probably is a bunch of artwork too. But I didn’t go and dig into that. I was, you know, looking at historical fiction, because it was really fascinating how different books have their sympathy either with the nobility or with the peasants. But the presentation of the peasants is so very stereotypically dreadful.

Anne Brannen  37:51 

Usually when we’re looking at these things, these events that were popular in the 19th century, there will be a whole lot of 19th century art also. Like the black dinner, got a bunch of that, but the imagery about the Jacquerie actually is mostly medieval.

Michelle Butler  38:10 

Huh. Fascinating.

Anne Brannen  38:12 

Yeah, I mean, there’s some stuff. You know, there’s some nice wood cuts and whatnot. But yeah, there is some later, it isn’t like artists didn’t touch it at all. But it isn’t that popular kind of thing as like, for instance, the siege of Constantinople or the Sicilian Vespers–you look up the images, and they go on and on and on and on. Oh, or that time that King John had his nephew murdered. There’s a lot of 19th century imagery about that. And the boys in the tower. But not about the Jacquerie.

Michelle Butler  38:46 

It’s such a perfect storm of all these things coming together. You have this uprising, which then comes down to us as this time of such horrific atrocities. As we go poking at it, we find, well, actually, they were relatively restrained, although it gets kicked off with that murder of nine noblemen. But then they’re basically property damage, but there’s pretty significant violence to put it down. It was interesting to me that the sorts of crimes that the peasants are accused of having done during this uprising are the same kinds of crimes that they’re accused of having done during the Great Famine. So we have all of these accusations of cannibalism and wanton violence and rape–it’s the same set of things that we saw people being accused of during the Great Famine that there weren’t evidence of then either. That’s just the toolbox of how to say that the non-nobles are expressing their discontent.

Anne Brannen  39:55 

The nobles are very scared of the peasants.

Michelle Butler  39:59 

I’m sure, since this is French, you have some reading it backwards through the lens of the French Revolution.

Anne Brannen  40:07 

Oh, yeah. Yeah. You often see people talking about it as being kind of pointing toward the French Revolution. I don’t think it really does. It’s different. But one of the things also that I find interesting about the Jacquerie is that… well, let me put it this way. What did they want? What did they want to happen?

Michelle Butler  40:26 

They wanted to…well, they say they want to be protected. They say they want to have the lord stop stealing everything from them.

Anne Brannen  40:38 

Did they say that? Because we don’t have their writings.

Michelle Butler  40:41 

That’s true. Yeah, that’s hard. Because we don’t have…

Anne Brannen  40:44 

Because we don’t know. We know how bad the circumstances were. We know that there were many, many pieces of the badness of the circumstances. They’re not like, shouting, give us bread. I don’t think they’re even shouting, death to all the nobles, although it looks like they’re trying to kill all the nobles. But that’s what the nobles think. What they are getting rid of is property. But what exactly? They’re pissed off the nobles have not been behaving. So we can extrapolate, well, maybe they want the nobles to behave, but we don’t really know. Whereas with the English peasants revolt, we have a list. Here’s what we want. They don’t get any of it. But we have a list of what they want.

That’s true. Either that never existed or it’s not been preserved.

I find that really interesting, because I’m like, what is it they want? It’s true, for something like Piers Plowman–a lovely example–it’s true that a lot of time in medieval rebellions, what is wanted is not an overthrow of the system– which actually the peasants revolt said they wanted, we want an end to serfdom–it isn’t that the system needs to go but that the people in the system need to do their parts. So, you know, the churchmen need to be good churchmen and the nobles need to be good noblemen, and the peasants need to be good peasants, and then everything will be okay. But it isn’t usually a reimagining of how things should be. I’m not seeing…if there’s a reimagining here, I don’t know what it is.

Yeah, yeah.

It was one of those horrible questions where it’s like, wait, wait a minute. We can extrapolate. But I don’t think we know.

Michelle Butler  42:35 

Yeah. Her book provides a really useful reminder that so much of our source material is not unbiased. Almost all kinds of chronicles have a perspective. But these ones in particular are from the point of view of the nobles who are paying the bills, and so of course, they’re saying, ‘Boy, this was dreadful. This was just appalling.’

Anne Brannen  42:59 

‘And there was no reason for it. There was no reason for it.’ If people are going around with a list of grievances–we want this and we want that–it’s really hard to say there’s no reason for it. Because here’s my list. There is no list. So the noblemen are able to say, there’s no reason, they all just went nuts. We don’t know why. The Jacquerie. So it becomes infamous. Yeah, it gets referred to in the French Revolution, but there’s not a lot…there’s just no a clear line running from one to the other. I mean, the French Revolution, they were pretty clear what they want. What do we want? We want no nobles, and you’re dead. We’re gonna restructure everything. That’s our plan. Give me a guillotine.

Michelle Butler  43:39 

Her discussion about how there’s uprisings both in the city and in the countryside, but not necessarily for the same reasons was a useful reminder.

Anne Brannen  43:51 

Yes, because the townspeople typically saw themselves as being better than the peasants because the commoners in the town are what will become the bourgeoisie. They do things like be goldsmiths and the grocers and whatnot. They’re not working the land. It’s interesting to see so early on that split between urban and rural that for instance here in America is a big big damn deal these days.

Michelle Butler  44:19 

They’re both up in arms but it’s not necessarily the same reasons and they’re not always working together. Sometimes they are and sometimes they’re not. The city piece of it kind of gets lost it becomes distilled down into ‘well, you know, the peasants. It’s just the countryside, it’s just the peasants. ‘The city part of it gets lost as it comes down as an ideological understanding.

Anne Brannen  44:45 

This is true, although Etienne Marcel himself–there’s statues of him–he comes down as a figure but exactly where it is he fits in is not as clear. There’s kind of a lionization of him but it’s not clear how it’s all connecting to the history that we’re talking about at the moment. If you’re having a coup, then what you want is pretty clear. We want you to not be in power and we will be in power instead. That’s what. They had a coup in Paris. It’s not what was going on with Jacquerie.

Michelle Butler  45:17 

There’s a lot of remittances handed out but not for the leaders of this. They get executed. The spice merchant, for example.

Anne Brannen  45:27 

Although not the noble leaders. They don’t get executed.

Yeah.

And well, y’all had already been murdered. Assassinated.

Michelle Butler  45:39 

It’s just fascinating to me that the reasons that get attributed to the peasants for the uprising were actually true during the Great Famine–everybody’s starving–and there isn’t an uprising then.

Anne Brannen  45:53 

I tell you, though, that one of the things about uprisings when you’re starving is that it’s really hard to do because you are not…you can’t do it. There wasn’t an uprising during the Irish famine, there wasn’t an uprising during the Holodomor, that’s not when you do these things. What you’re doing is lying around in the street dying. It’s just very, very hard to get a uprising.

Michelle Butler  46:14 

I found a really interesting article about the movie A Walk with Love and Death, by Kevin Hardy, who’s a medievalist–the article’s from 1999. One of the points he makes is that this is medievalism, that this kind of story being told in this way, is using the medieval as a place, but it’s even if it’s trying, as it may or may not be, to be historically accurate, you can’t actually do that. So you have is very much also a product of the 60s. The young people are embracing premarital sex in a way that is very much a product of the ideology of the 1960s.

Anne Brannen  46:59 

We know that people had premarital sex, but they talked about it differently. Well, that was our discussion of the Jacquerie and historical revision of the idea of the Jacquerie. The next time that you hear from us, we’re going to be talking about the pretenders who showed up after the boys in the tower disappeared. So they’re pretenders to the throne of England, supposedly one of the boys in the tower, though they weren’t. Spoiler alert. That will be fun.  We’re gonna go back to England.

Michelle Butler  47:35 

I’m reasonably certain that pretending to be the heir to the throne is a crime. I think we’re on totally safe ground there.

Anne Brannen  47:43 

There’s even some death involved. There’s not wholesale slaughter, if I remember correctly, but there’s some death in it. Right. So that’s what we’ll do. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today only with less technology. You can find us on any of the places where the podcasts hang out, Apple and Spotify, various places. You can also find us at truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. There are links to the podcast and show notes and transcripts. I usually find lovely pictures of whatever’s going on. So you can have those too. You can leave comments for us and you can reach us through there. If you know of any medieval crimes that you think that we should pay attention to that we haven’t talked about yet, let us know. They might be on our list or they might not. Got a long list. You can always use more material. Yeah, so that’s us. Bye.

Michelle Butler  48:38 

Bye.