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In 1478, in Florence, the banking family of the Medici was very powerful. Very powerful indeed. But another banking family, the Pazzi, were not happy with this.  No, no! They wanted to be more powerful in Florence than the Medici were! So they created A Plan. Well, a few plans, really, but finally  one of the plans was carried out, which was to kill two of the Medici at High Mass in the Cathedral, after which the citizens of Florence were going to say, yay! hoorah! Now the Pazzi will be our leaders! Only they didn’t, and all of the members of the Pazzi Conspiracy got hung from the windows of the city hall, and Lorenzo de’ Medici, who (unlike his brother) had survived the Conspiracy, continued to be Lorenzo the Magnificent.  Michelle is Highly Scandalized by all this.  Highly, I say. 

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In 1127, Stephen of Blois swore an oath that when Henry I, King of England, died, Stephen would support Henry’s daughter (and Stephen’s cousin), Empress Maud, as queen ruler of England.  But in 1135, when Henry died, Stephen hightailed it to London and grabbed the throne. In this episode, we discuss the civil war that followed, and several interesting bits of it — Empress Maud escapes from Oxford by walking over the iced river in a blizzard; Queen Matilda, Stephen’s wife, manages to get the citizens of London to throw Matilda out, by playing the girl card; Stephen pays the wages of the mercenaries that Henry, Maud’s son, hired when he invaded Stephen’s kingdom; William of Blois, Stephen’s son, signs away the throne of England because really he has more sense than most of his family. Also, if that rapey song in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers bothers you — as well it might, even if the brothers do come to understand that just grabbing women is not the way to create marriages with them — Michelle has fixed this for you by writing a verse which is all about the awesomeness of Norman women.  Which she sings.  Life is good.

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One evening in March of 1566, Mary, Queen of Scots, was sitting with one of her half-sisters and her secretary David Rizzio, eating supper. Suddenly, the door slammed open; Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, and his cohorts burst in, stabbed Rizzio, and pointed a gun at the Queen.  Who was 6 months pregnant at the time, with the future James I/IV. Then the band of conspirators took Rizzio out, stabbed him 56 times, and threw him down the stairs. We’ll give you all the background to this, and also explain what happened to Darnley, but in essence, all the conspirators were in on a Stupid Plot, which was meant to get Darnley, Mary’s husband, declared King of Scotland. (That, by the way, did not happen.) So that was a very bad evening for Mary, Queen of Scots, though probably not the worst, since later on her cousin Elizabeth, Queen of England, was going to keep her in captivity and then cut her head off. Besides Rizzio’s demise, we discuss why the Nazis were all for Mary and not Elizabeth. Fun times!

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It’s important, in the middle of the winter, to take part in raucous activities, and there were lots in medieval Europe. Boys being bishops, men and women switching clothes, parishioners gambling in the churches, and, unsurprisingly, most everybody drinking.  Lots. Besides giving you the history, Anne explains a Christmas Celebration Gone Terribly Wrong, and Michelle tells you about that time that the Tudors used the Christmas celebrations as a prelude to an execution. Tacky.

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One night, in Paris, thugs broke into the room of Peter Abelard, renowned theologian and philosopher, and beloved teacher, and castrated him.  Because Fulbert, the uncle of Heloise, was REALLY annoyed that Abelard and Heloise were keeping their marriage secret.  Which they had entered into so that Fulbert wouldn’t be so upset about the affair that they had been having.  Also their son, Astrolabe, or, as Anne likes to think of him, Global Positioning System. Fulbert just had no moderation. Abelard went off to be a monk for while and then wander around, Heloise went off to run a nunnery, they both wrote lots of letters, and Astrolabe (after being raised by Abelard’s sister Denise) grew up to work in at least two churches. And then later Abelard and Heloise became very famous as tragic lovers. And you can go and leave letters on their supposed grave in Paris, asking them for help with your love affairs, though really that doesn’t seem like a great idea, given all that bad luck they had, and also they probably aren’t there. The end.

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King  Æthelred of England really did not have the wherewithal to successfully deal with the Danish/English tension that he had inherited with the throne, which had been caused by Viking raids for about 100 years,  notably established by what the English called The Great Heathen Army, which took over much of England.  Oh, too bad. One solution, he thought, was to kill off all the Danes in England.  This did not work. For one thing, the Danes did not in fact get killed off, though the English did kill some of them — notably in Oxford, where they burnt the church down with Danish settlers gathered inside. For another thing, the Vikings invaded again, not long after the Massacre. The throne of England went back and forth between the English and Danes, after that, for some decades, until, in 1066, the Normans would invade and take everything over, establishing a NEW Viking dynasty, one which spoke French. And liked to write history.

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(Special Episode — Post-Medieval!) Between 1590 and 1610 (probably), Elizabeth Bathory tortured and killed girls and women (probably).  When all of that got stopped, she was arrested — but never accused — and four of her servants were arrested, tortured, and put on trial.  Three of them were executed, and the last imprisoned for life. Elizabeth was put under house arrest. She was never accused, she never went to trial, and she died of natural causes. What. The. Hell. We discuss the scanty evidence, we discuss the mushrooming of the Stories About Her Horrible Badness, and Michelle’s rabbit hole concerns current tourism in Slovakia, which is making a killing (ha ha) from tours of the ruins of her castle, and selling really dark red wine. Since one of the stories is that she bathed in blood to keep her good looks. She didn’t.  But she was indeed very badly behaved.

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This is not an interpretation of Pope Stephen getting murdered. This is Jean-Paul Laurens’s 1870 interpretation of WHY Pope Stephen got murdered, which is that he held the Cadaver Synod. That’s the former Pope Formosus propped up in the papal throne, wearing papal garb. Next to him is the deacon who is speaking for him. Hands down, the best painting of the Cadaver Synod.

In 897, in Rome, Pope Stephen VI was strangled, in prison.  There. That’s the True Crime. We don’t know who did it — a representative of the people of Rome, we suppose. The interesting part of this crime is not that he got murdered, but why he got murdered. Which was that he had dug up the  7 months dead corpse of a predecessor and put it on trial. In fancy papal garb. With a deacon giving answers to questions, since the dead pope on trial couldn’t do it. We bring you The Cadavar Synod! And Michelle finds musicals. 

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One day, after the Saxons won one of the many battles in the Saxon Wars, Charlemagne, who was pretty annoyed, ordered the mass execution of 4,500 warriors.  This didn’t really tarnish his golden reputation until the 18th century, when it began to bother people.  We discuss the Saxons, Charlemagne’s reputation, the trouble that the Nazis had in figuring out how to talk about him, and, oddly enough, Christopher Lee and his heavy metal Charlemagne albums. 

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Edward I invaded Scotland in 1296, on account of (he said) their broken feudal obligations. Amongst the usual spoils of war — prisoners, horses, weapons, nice gold stuff — he took a rock. Weighing about 335 pounds. We discuss the theft of the Stone of Destiny, and its subsequent history.  Including, to our delight, a 20th century liberation of the Stone, wherein four university students break into Westminster Abbey and take the stone back to Scotland. Then it went back to England.  Now it’s in Scotland again.  It’s a very important rock, really.

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