True Crime Medieval

Béla of Macsó was still in his twenties when he went to a meeting on Margaret Island (which is in the middle of the Danube, in Budapest), which wasn’t a meeting at all, but a trap. There had been fairly complicated struggles for power in Hungary among members of a strikingly dysfunctional family — Béla’s grandfather, the king, had caused problems, handing out lands to his children, and Béla of Macsó had fought for his mother against her brother, his uncle; then the uncle and the grandfather made a peace treaty; then the grandfather died, as one does, and the uncle was king,  but then he died, too, and his 10 year old son became king, and several bunches of nobles fought with each other, in the course of which Béla of Macsó entered the courtyard of the Dominican convent on Margaret Island, for a meeting which wasn’t there, and got brutally murdered. Really, this would all be, alas, just a regular Tuesday for a royal medieval family, except that Béla’s skeleton has been studied by bioarcheologists using several scientific methods, and Michell has had the time of her life, and she will tell you all about the things we’ve learned about poor Béla of Macsó. You’re welcome.

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In the medieval scriptoria, amongst all the holy books, and the hagiographies, and the books of philosophy, and the legal charters, not to mention the beautiful illuminated manuscripts, there were often, we are sorry to tell you, forgeries being created. Sometimes monasteries needed to codify some history that hadn’t gotten written down when it happened, or to provide documentation of some land sale that hadn’t gotten written down, or to provide evidence for things that didn’t happen at all, so that they could have more power or money — that sort of thing. Some of those scriptoria were so good at producing forgeries that they made them for other monasteries, running forgery rings. The scriptorium at Westminster Abbey, for instance, had several master forgers — one of them being Osbert of Clare, who produced several of the fake charters at not only Westminster Abbey, but also other abbeys, such as that at Ramsey, which didn’t have the wherewithal to produce these things themselves. Anne explains medieval forgery in general, of which there was a whole lot, and Michelle, though very sad that no popular works about Westminster are out there, was gratified to find some excellent scholars, along with a medieval method for providing two factor identification. Also, nobody dies.

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The Vikings impacted European history — west and east — for centuries, from 793, when they attacked Lindisfarne Abbey in England, up until 1066, when they attacked England and lost to Harold Godwinson (though Harold would lose the next battle, at Hastings, in his fight against the Normans or, “French Vikings,” as your hosts like to call them).  These dates aren’t really true, since the Vikings raided before and after them. They’re just nice clean dates to remember. But at any rate, centuries it was, and the Vikings were very scary, and very good at snatch-and-grab attacks, except sometimes they settled down in places like York, or of course, Normandy. And during all this time, they often attacked the island of Iona, targeting the Abbey, since that was where most of the stuff was. On Christmas Eve of 986, however, when they attacked Iona again, slaughtering the abbot and 15 monks, it wasn’t a raid for raiding’s sake. Times had shifted, and the Vikings were becoming church patrons. Iona was attacked in 986 as part of a struggle between secular powers and church powers. There was slaughter and raiding, to be sure, but those were the methods, not the point. In somewhat of a reversal of our usual roles, Michelle explains this all to you, and Anne gets really excited about the possibility of taking a retreat on Iona, with meditative tours and, of course, a tea room.

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As far as we are concerned, a book entitled “Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land,” is, obviously, a book to read. To our joy, that book is informed, and readable, and full of Things We Did Not Know. And to our further joy, the author, Steve Tibble, who came to talk to us for this episode, is engaging, deeply informed, and kind hearted, and, of course, full of Things We Did Not Know. In our conversation, we discuss, among other things, the mafia that the Frankish prisoners of war ran in Cairo; the Viking crusade, which involved killing lions in North Africa; the state of the Pilgrim Road that civilian Europeans were using to reach the Holy Land, which had so many slaughtered pilgrims lying on the side of the road that it lead to the Templars getting involved; and the European method of getting rid of outlaws, which was to make them into crusaders. There is yet another saintly pirate, as well, I think our third so far.  In our talk and in this book, Steve focuses on the violence that was the foundation of the Crusades — on all sides — but also gives his overarching view of the way the Crusades were a result not just of clashing religions, but of climate change and the conflicts between nomadic and sedentary societies.  Oh, and by the way, we all agree that it’s really a shame that Cormac McCarthy didn’t become an historian of the Crusades.  And that there are a lot of potential historical novels and movies wandering around in this book.  (Link to Steve’s website, and information on his books, are in the Show Notes.)

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To be fair, the Vikings attacked Paris several times, but it’s the major sieges that get remembered — the one in 845, when they invaded Paris on Easter Sunday, got bought off with a fairly large ransom, and then the one that started in 885 and ended in 886, after nearly a year of a siege wherein the Vikings,  branching out from their usual plundering, used catapults and battering rams and other such non-Viking military paraphernalia, in an attempt to invade the city again. They were doing this on and off, though, and finally the surviving Vikings that hadn’t gone off to sack other Frankish towns  dragged their longboats over to another river and went elsewhere. So the Franks had won, though the Vikings had managed to destroy one of the bridges and much of the surrounding countryside, and later one of their leaders, Rollo, would swear allegiance to Charles the Simple of France and become the first Norman, in what became Normandy. Michelle, naturally, found an epic poem written by a monk who was in Paris during that last siege, a poem modelled on Virgil, which contained so many difficult and impressive words that monks would pass it around for decades, to be consulted when they wanted to sound really intelligent. (Hint: Greek sounds fancier than Latin.)

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If you were living in Western Europe in the late middle ages and early modern age, you might well come across partly eaten humans, whilst walking around in the woods, or even, alas, strolling in Paris. OBVIOUSLY these partly eaten humans had been attacked by werewolves! Duh! There were a lot of real wolves roaming around,  attacking humans, if the wolves had rabies, or there was a widespread famine affecting all the living beings, but of course the real wolves hadn’t attacked and partly eaten the people you were stumbling over. No. It was the fault of actual humans, who, for nefarious reasons, had made deals with the Devil, and therefore could become wolves whenever they wanted, with the help of magic girdles and whatnot. Your hosts discuss the connection of werewolves with witches in the late middle ages and early modern era. Really, that would be the point of all this. But Anne is fascinated both by real wolves and the fact that it was only Western Europe that was in on this nonsense, on account of Eastern Europe doing other things altogether, and Michelle explains Peter Stumpp, who was ONLY a werewolf and not a witch, apparently. Also, John Steinbeck gets involved. Happy Halloween!

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The battle of Agincourt was almost over when Henry V ordered the prisoners killed. Nowadays, this would clearly be a war crime, but in 1415, it wasn’t, though nobody liked it. Henry did not expect to win the battle, which involved a fairly small bunch of muddy unarmored Englishmen with dysentery up against a formidable line of armored Frenchmen on horses. So he didn’t know, when a group of Frenchmen at the rear of their forces attempted to regroup, that they were going nowhere and were not an issue. He thought they were, and that then the Frenchmen at the rear of the English, the war prisoners, would be able to break through, pick up arms from the battlefield, and slaughter the English. The English were all assuming that none of them were going home, but they were fighting as best they could. But as it happens the battle was almost over anyway, and the English won — they had lost a few hundred men; the French had lost several thousands. Anne is extremely happy, because she gets to talk about the Welsh longbowmen, and Michelle is extremely happy because she gets to tell you where the people of Normandy were hiding whilst Henry and his army roamed around, and believe me, you will not be able to guess where they were. Unless you already have inside knowledge.

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Columbus’s first trip to what would be called the Americas, in 1492, was a difficult one. Nobody thought he would actually get anywhere, since he had grossly underestimated the size of the globe, but the Spanish monarchs had some extra cash, since the war with the Moors was over, and thought they might as well fund the enterprise, because otherwise one of the other European countries was going to get across the Atlantic first, so they let him have some unneeded ships that were not in good shape (besides being much too small to carry the necessary supplies). He was supposed to find a route across the Atlantic to the Indies; he was supposed to claim any lands he found for Spain; he was supposed to establish colonies and manage them well; he was supposed to bring back lots of nifty stuff. Like gold. When he did arrive on land, there were humans there already, as we know, and they were wearing gold ornaments. So he captured some and demanded that they tell him where they had gotten the gold, but they didn’t actually have much, so he enslaved them instead. After that, things got worse. So much worse that even the monarchs of Spain noticed how bad it was, and he was arrested for mismanagement and brutality, found guilty, and stripped of his offices. Michelle found an awesome biography and got immersed in Columbus’s religious fanaticism, and Anne got immersed in the Europeans’ obsession with water alternatives to the lost Silk Road. It’s not a special episode, since we think of Columbus as essentially medieval, but it is a commemorative episode, for Indigenous People’s Day.

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In the early 16th century, the peasants of Central Europe were being overtaxed, overworked, and underfed, and the lords of the lands kept making things worse. Things worsened, after which they worsened some more, snails got involved, and then there was the biggest peasant revolt in Europe before the French Revolution. If you’re a native English speaker, and you haven’t heard of it, great though it be, don’t feel bad; there is only one book in English on the Great German Peasants’ War, and it was published this year. Michelle has a new hero, a badass knight beloved by Goethe, Sir Walter Scott, and the Internet, and Anne is quite perturbed about the snails. By the way. As far as we’re concerned, the revolt wasn’t the crime; killing 100,000 peasants was.

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The Knights Hospitaler and the Ottoman Troops of Suleiman the Magnificent were well matched, with state-of-the-art cannonry and defenses, but it was Suleiman who commanded the Janissaries, the formidable household infantry troops loyal to the Sultan. Occasionally, though, they got out of hand; briefly, during the second truce after the second Siege of Rhodes, they entered the city and did things that Suleiman had promised wouldn’t happen, such as plundering, smashing things in churches, and assaulting women. It was just for a little bit of a day, though, and then they were sorry. Which they showed by saying other troops did it. Anne is fascinated by the Janissaries, and Michelle is very gratified to explain to us all the standardization of gunpowder and cannon material, which is actually much more exciting than this sentence made it sound. Also she found the first opera ever written in English. Of course she did.

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