Transcripts V

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. Transcribed by https://

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.