True Crime Medieval

Mikhail of Chernihiv, the Grand Prince of Kyiv and Prince of Chernihiv, went to several neighboring states to ask for help fighting the Golden Horde -- he had the idea that there would be strength in alliance -- but nobody would help, on account of they were too busy fighting each other, and also the Mongols had not actually gotten to their houses yet, so why should they care. Then the Golden Horde destroyed Kyiv, and told Mikhail he had to come give obeisance to Batu Khan, and he did that, but he wouldn't worship idols, which was part of the deal, so the Golden Horde executed him. And then he pretty quickly became venerated, and then a saint as a martyr, and his relics were taken to Chernihiv but now they are in Moscow. Besides all that, MIchelle is totally impressed by the number of his vitae surviving. Also that Batu Khan is connected to Russian Atlantis. Also there is a kangaroo. (Spoiler alert: the Golden Horde did in fact get to those other neighboring states, after they had finished looting Kyivan Rus.)

King Duncan did indeed get killed, in 1040, and Macbeth was around, and maybe even was near him at the time, but Duncan wasn't old, he wasn't asleep in bed, and there was no crime, because Macbeth's forces slaughtered Duncan's forces in battle, and Duncan was one of the slaughtered. In this episode, Anne explains all of the history that can be explained -- it's a slippery bunch of facts, but there was a King Duncan, he did die, and Macbeth was king after him. Michelle explains the historical sources, and mentions the novels, but really what she wanted to know was where the hell that theatre superstition about not ever saying the title of the Scottish Play in the theater, at pain of being made to do whatever silly things are in fashion at the time -- well, where the hell that came from. And we want to know, too.

For all of the middle ages, almost everybody believed that earlier in church history, there had been a pope who was, instead of being male,  a woman, who  met, alas, a Bad End. She wasn't there, as some people suspected then, and as we know now, but the story is so damn good it's hard to let go of. Whichever version of the story you're dealing with. Anne explains the different versions of Pope Joan and how we know she wasn't there, and Michelle is delighted by the vast amount of popular works telling her story. Musicals! No kidding! And too many novels to list.

As we all know, if you were accused of a crime in the middle ages, or if you were in danger, and you ran to a nearby church, you could have sanctuary, and then you were safe. Well, this is true, more or less, but exactly what you needed to do, and how the whole thing worked, changed over time and across the continent. Michelle and Anne wanted to know more about the mechanisms of sanctuary, so they went to find out, and will tell you all about it. Anne can explain to you the ceremony you would follow when it was time to leave the church, and the rules about church sanctuary these days, and Michelle can tell you about very interesting sources, and the problems with figuring out how sanctuary works, even in the middle ages. Oh, and by the way, it didn't always work. Sometimes people hacked you to death in front of the altar. Then THEY were in trouble.

There's not a lot of murder in Iceland -- there was a disconcerting spike in the number of homicides last year, 8 altogether -- so, obviously, there aren't a lot of murderers. And none of the murderers of Iceland are serial killers. With one exception.  In the last part of the 16th century, not long after Iceland had been forced to institute the death penalty for capital crimes (this was Denmark's idea), Axlar-Björn Pétursson, who lived out on the west coast, on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, murdered lots of people who came by his farm looking for work, and became Iceland's one and only serial killer. And then, on account of the death penalty part, didn't get to just go be an exiled outlaw. Besides the details, such as they are, of Axlar-Björn's crimes, Anne is quite taken by Snæfellsnes and its eco-tourism, and Michelle, though she appreciates the folk-tale quality of the whole story, really wants to let us all know about Jón Árnason, the eminent Icelandic folk tale collector, because he was a self-taught scholar who is deserving of high honor, and Michelle does admire scholars who get lots done on a budget.

Adalbert of Prague wanted very much to go Christianize the Prussians, but they were just not having it, so they hacked him up and cut his head off, and that is why he is a Saint, with an enormous number of churches around the globe dedicated to him. Anne spends time thinking about what was the snack that we are told Adalbert and his companions were eating before the murder, and Michelle considers the recently discovered account of Adalbert that is older than the one we had, although really what she's interested in is St. Bruno of Querfurt, the Second Apostle to the Prussians, who admired Adalbert so much that he went off to the Balkans just like his hero, and got slaughtered in Lithuania. Michelle's quite taken by the fact that nobody really outside of Poland pays any attention to Bruno. Alas.

Adalbert of Prague wanted very much to go Christianize the Prussians, but they were just not having it, so they hacked him up and cut his head off, and that is why he is a Saint, with an enormous number of churches around the globe dedicated to him. Anne spends time thinking about what was the snack that we are told Adalbert and his companions were eating before the murder, and Michelle considers the recently discovered account of Adalbert that is older than the one we had, although really what she's interested in is St. Bruno of Querfurt, the Second Apostle to the Prussians, who admired Adalbert so  much that he went off to the Balkans just like his hero, and got slaughtered in Lithuania. Michelle's quite taken by the fact that nobody really outside of Poland pays any attention to Bruno. Alas.

Usually our special episodes move out of our 1000 year time zone, but for this one we stay in the middle ages and move off of the European continent, to one of the incidents in the fall of the Umayyad caliphate and the rise of the Abbasid caliphate, a blood feast! We haven't had one of those for a while, and we were very excited, but then we did our due diligence and discovered that it probably didn't happen. That is, the Umayyades were slaughtered, alright, but probably not at a banquet where they got clubbed to near death after hearing insulting poetry, and then served as banquet tables when rugs got thrown over them while they finished dying and the Abbasides kept eating. No. Probably not. Sorry.

From the 12th century to Renaissance, the Ordelaffi family ruled the commune of Forli, in Northern Italy. On and off. Also, on and off again. When they weren't fighting others for the commune -- Florence, the Emperor, the Pope -- they were fighting each other, and in 1376, poison became a favorite weapon, when Sinibaldi I Ordelaffi poisoned first his uncle and then his cousin, so that he could have Forli. He's not even our protagonist, though, because we lit, for this episode, on Pino III Orderlaffi, who started poisoning wives, a sibling, and his mom, and is therefore sort of iconic in the history of Ordelaffi badnesses. Michelle loved this episode, cause she got to learn all about poison in medieval and Renaissance Italy. She will tell you all about it.

William Donn de Burgh, the 3rd Earl of Ulster, was, alas, not so great at being the Earl of Ulster. Starving his cousin Walter Liath de Burgh to death led to Walter's sister Gylle (also of course a cousin of William's) getting her husband to have him murdered. And then, the whole succession problem -- there were several cousins wandering around, and William's heir was a girl, and that was right out -- led to the Burke Civil War. What with one thing and another, though the de Burghs married into the Plantagenets and so became ancestors of the English royal family, they were also instrumental in causing Lots of Problems for England, in their attempt to keep Ireland under control, so their contribution to history is sorta vexed. Michelle is somewhat distressed by the lack of historical fiction about these people, but greatly mollified by the idea of touring Carrickfergus.

Humans have been throwing each other out of windows pretty much as long as humans have had windows more than one story or so off the ground, but only Prague is famous for them. Two of them actually led to wars, even. We are very happy to tell you about the famous defenestrations, wherin all sorts of officials got thrown out of windows, and Michelle is happy to tell you about the tourist trade. Oh, and also Susan Howe's poem "Defenestration of Prague," which is, of course, about Ireland. Because metaphors. 

It's Episode 100! So we both went through the episodes we've published so far, to pick our favorites.  Out of them, we picked three apiece, and then, as a grand winner, the one that turned up on both of our lists -- not the highest favorite of either of us, but pretty damn beloved.  We explain why they all made the cut. And had a lot of fun, remembering them. Here's to the next 100! We do have a pretty long list to see us through. it's a 1000 years and an entire continent, and people behave badly lots of the time. Works for us.

It was unusual for medieval women to kill their fathers, and especially unusual for them to use crossbows to do it. Juliane de Fontrevault tried both, but she missed King Henry I, who was at the time besieging her castle in Normandy. There had been an altercation, you see, which led to a major hostage failure, wherein Juliane's husband Eustace blinded the young hostage sent to Henry, and Henry blinded and cut the noses off the two girls sent to him as hostages. Who were his grandchildren, by the way. Eventually Henry forgave both Juliane and Eustace; Eustace got to keep a castle and Juliane got to go to Fontevrault Abbey, which was at that time all shiny and new, and her daughters got to go with her. So! It all turned out really well! A happy family story. You're welcome.

There were not, in the Middle Ages, any chastity belts. They did not exist. Really, they didn't. They show up later, when enlighted ages say that they were used in the Middle Ages. Then, enlightened ages invented them, and now you can buy them on Amazon. Michelle explains how we know they didn't exist, and how they got invented, and why the later ages that invented them said the Middle Ages did it. Anne, on the other hand, had a lot of fun researching the state of chastity belts now. Oh, and that hacking episode. Pro tip: don't attach your private parts to the internet.

Sometimes when our medieval rulers get assassinated we can see why, and that's the case for Galeazzo Maria Sforza, who was a very bad sort of person. So, not surprisingly, he got stabbed to death by conspirators. Two of them were out for personal gain, but one was a poet who was, he believed, serving the greater communal good, which charms Anne. We tell you all about Sforza and the assassination, which is, really, the point  of this episode, but the gem of information for Michelle was that one of the churches of Florence got burnt down on account of spectacular stage effects that were really too spectacular.

During the Fragmentation of Poland, which lasted from 1138 to 1320, Leszek Bialy -- Leszek the White -- managed to reign as the High Duke of Poland four times, the last reign going on for 16 years before it ended, on account of his having been assassinated. That's a long reign, during the age of fragmentation, when the realm was, well, fragmented, and the position of High Duke got passed around pretty often.  Leszek was attending a conference of several dukes when he was attacked in his bath, escaping naked on his horse for a short distance before the attackers caught up with him.  So, he's well known for that, because it's dramatic, and a  great subject for painting, but he's also famous for refusing to go on crusade because there was no beer in the Holy Land.  Which is a really true thing; there's documentation.

Henry d'Almain didn't really want to fight in the Second Barons' War,  because the leaders of the two sides were both his uncles, and when his uncle Simon de Montfort was killed and mutilated in the last battle, he wasn't part of that, so it was really unseemly for his cousins, the sons of Simon de Montfort, to find him in a church in Italy and slaughter him while he was clinging to the altar. As vengeance goes, it was a really stupid vengeance that didn't settle anything, and only got the de Montfort boys into more trouble. (Their father wouldn't have done such a thing; the de Montforts were going downhill, that generation.)  Anne wrassles with her grudging respect for Simon de Montfort, and Michelle finds a really badly behaved Victorian scholar. Because bad behavior transcends the Middle Ages. 

We thought it would be interesting to talk about the Crimean Slave Trade, but we had not known that would, essentially, cover all of written history and all of the Old World. But it was on the schedule, and we found it interesting. So! We'll start with the mother of Carlo de Medici, Maddelena, who was captured in or sold from Circassia (it's over on the northeast shore of the Black Sea), and then sold in Crimea to a Venetian who took her to Venice and sold her to Cosimo de Medici, who took her to Florence. The Crimean slave trade was the major location of international slave trading from the 15th century until the 18th century, though it had existed much earlier. Maddelena was one of millions of people who were forcibly passed through the ports of Crimea. We distill a giant topic! But we mention Cervantes. He was one of the millions. Oh, and Captain John Smith.  Pocahontas gets a mention. She wasn't one of the slaves. She just got stuck with one of the stories. 

Michael Servetus was one of those brilliant people who can be a bit annoying. He read and/or spoke Spanish and French and Hebrew and Latin and Arabic and Greek and who knows what all. He studied and/or wrote books on theology, medicine, mathematics, law, and some other stuff. He wrote poetry. He had a bunch of degrees. But he had to leave the Studium of Zaragoza because of a fight with the High Master; he nearly got the death penalty in Paris for translating Cicero's De Divinatione (but they decided to just make him withdraw the book instead); he was in prison for a few days for injuring a physician who attacked him out of jealousy; he was arrested in France for heresy, and the Catholics were going to burn him at the stake; but he escaped --- and then, instead of going to Italy, he went to Geneva, where John Calvin, who disagreed with Servetus in lots of ways, was instrumental in getting him burned at the stake there. So it was the Protestants who finally killed him, rather than the Catholics. It wasn't John Calvin's finest moment. But on the other hand, Calvin had argued for cutting Servetus's head off rather than burning him with his books.  Well, almost all of his theolgy. Three copies of the theology text survived, and Michelle will tell you all about them.

On the second Christmas that the Pilgrims spent in Plymouth (the first had been spent cutting down trees and building houses), the governor of the colony, William Bradford, gathered the men together so that they could all go do the Lord's work (which was probably cutting down trees and building houses). Some of the colonists were newly arrived, and hadn't come for religious reasons, but more for finding wealth and opportunity in the New World. This portion of the men did not think that Christmas didn't exist and should not be recognized. They thought it did exist and they should get to have celebratory fun. So they talked Bradford into letting them go, and they went back and played games in the street. Bradford was surprised when he found them, since he thought they were praying and meditating in their homes about whether or not Christmas actually existed, and when they had prayed and meditated enough, they would figure out that it didn't, and then they would come help out with the Lord's work. Which was not, at all, in any way, playing games in the street. Anne gets to talk about Christmas and Colonial America, and Michelle found a rabbit hole that was so seductive she didn't read anything about William Bradford and the Naughty Boys, because she had to learn all about John Taylor, Water Poet, who had a lot to say about the dreadfulness of banning Christmas and, we've decided, is the protagonist of Michelle's next historical novel. Happy Holidays!

So, there were those two boys in the Tower of London, Edward V,  King of England, who was 12, and Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, who was 9, and they disappeared one summer after their uncle Richard declared them illegitimate and became King Richard III.  And it was a total mystery as to what happened to them, and still is, and Richard III was not king for very long before Henry Tudor, who was on one side descended from Tudur ap Gronwy Fychan, which made the English no never mind, but on the other side descended from King Edward III, and so was a claimant to the throne of England by blood if you squinted your eyes and looked sideways, was a very good claimant to the throne on account of winning the Battle of Bosworth, after which King Richard was buried under a future car park. Henry was king, then, and there weren't any more men left from the family of Richard III and Edward IV,  because the princes in the  tower had disappeared and everybody, including us, thought they were dead. But maybe they weren't !  Maybe they got away! They maybe escaped the Tower and went to Flanders! And that kind of imagining allowed for Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, both of whom, four years apart, claimed to be either Edward V, or Richard Duke of York, or even their cousin George.  Both of them became the center of rebellions. Both of them lost the fight for the crown. One was allowed to be a castle worker and the other was kept at court until he misbehaved once too often and got executed. So we explain all that. And Anne explains all of the pretenders to the English throne.  And what is Michelle's rabbit hole, this episode? The ACTUAL BED that was made for the wedding of Henry and Elizabeth. No, really. She got a book about it and it's her favorite part of this whole hoopla. 

In the summer of 1358, French peasants took up arms -- this means mostly sticks -- and attacked the nobility. They did indeed murder some of them, but mostly, almost entirely, the burnt down property. They didn't even loot. They just destroyed stuff. The nobility had gotten problematic, certainly, what with running away from important battles and then trying to squeeze more out of the peasantry so they could pay for further military adventures, though apparently not any  training. So the peasants were fed up, and they put great fear into the nobility, who then imagined that the peasants were committing lots and lots of atrocities, so the nobility had to go commit atrocities on the peasants, so as to make them harmless. It was a really really really bad summer. 

Vasvilkas, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, got assassinated for a reason that Michelle considers the stupidest assassination reason the podcast has seen so far, that being that when Vasvilkas, the Monk Prince, decided to give up the throne so he could go back to being a monk, he gave it to a brother in law, and another brother in law thought that Vasvilkas should have made him a co-ruler, so he murdered Vasvilkas. As MIchelle points out, he still didn't get to be co-ruler. So she went off to read about the changing legend of Vasvilkas, and Anne got to find out about the sacred grass snakes of Lithuania, and they were worth it, let me tell you. 

Sometimes students riot, maybe because of tuition hikes, or because a coach got fired for a sex abuse scandal, or because their team won a game, or because their team lost a game, or because the university became integrated, or because the government is moving into authoritarianism, or because the government already was authoritarian but is getting worse, and sometimes because the pub gave them bad wine. In the last case, around 100 people might just end up dead. Welcome to Oxford, 14th Century! The St. Scholastica Day Riot lasted for days, some of the students were scalped, university buildings were looted, there was a whole bunch of bell ringing, and the king got involved. Worst student riot ever. Hands down.

Philip, the King of France, married Ingeborg of Denmark, and it would have been a really great political alliance, except that after the wedding night Philip wanted out.  So he asked the pope to annul the marriage, saying that it hadn't been consummated, on account of witchcraft, and he sent Ingeborg to a convent. But Ingeborg said the marriage HAD been consummated, and the pope wouldn't annul the marriage, so Philip had a genealogy made up showing that his marriage to Ingeborg violated canon law because they were too closely related, since Philip's first wife had been Ingeborg's first cousin once removed, but it was a fake genealogy, Philip's first wife being Ingeborg's fourth cousin once removed, and nobody believed it. They eventually got reconciled, after the wife that Philip had married bigamously in the interim died. So there's that. Michelle got so interested in the idea of using witchcraft to make husbands impotent  (in the middle ages of course, not now)  that she ordered a book on it, so we can look forward to that.

Sandwiched between two legendary Holy Roman Emperors -- his father, Frederick Barbarossa, and his son, Frederick II -- Henry VI, who was not legendary, and who died at the age of 31 (his dad died at 67 and his son at 55; lots more time to rack up legendary activities), nevertheless managed to acquire a nickname  -- "The Cruel" -- in large part because of his belief in the efficacy of torturing political opponents in public. Besides discussing Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, Anne explains how many Crusades there were and why Henry was all set to go off on Crusade #3 1/2 when he died, and Michelle is delighted to tell you ALL about that time when Henry didn't die, with the rest of the nobles at a meeting, when the floor broke and they all fell into the cesspit. Well, Henry didn't. He was either hanging onto a window or having a side meeting in another room. She's got a poem, too, written in Latin. But she reads it to you in English.

Eorpwald, the ruler of East Anglia c 624, after his father died,  converted to Christianity because Edwin, the Deorian king, converted to Christianity, and managed to connect pretty  much the entire eastern coastal kingdoms of England.  So that lasted a few years, but then he got assassinated, on account of having converted to Christianity, and East Anglia became pagan again for a while. Eorpwald, the first ruler in England to be killed for being Christian, was therefore a martyr, and a saint. His murder is our crime, so we talk about that, but really, Anne gets to talk about Old English runes and the Norfolk Lavender Farm, and Michelle, to her great delight, gets to discuss Sutton Hoo, and really, that's why she put Eorpwald on our list.

In 1134, Melisende, the Queen of Jerusalem, who had, as a child, been raised to be the Queen  of Jerusalem all by herself, was sharing the throne with Fulk, her husband, who did not like sharing.  So he tried to get rid of her, by accusing her of adultery with her cousin Hugh of Jaffa, which was not a thing that was actually happening. And when Hugh fled (on account of not wanting to be in a duel with a guy bigger than The Mountain in Game of Thrones), Fulk sent somebody to assassinate him, The assassination failed, but Hugh was badly hurt, and the Council of Jerusalem, which had been very happy with Melisende as queen, and thought Fulk was some snooty newcomer from France, supported a palace coup, and Fulk really did not have much power after that. We discuss the badnesses of Fulk, and explain why, although Melisende ruled for 30 years, she hasn't been discussed much until recently. (Spoiler alert: Victorians. As usual.)

Hugh de Lacy, one of the Anglo-Normans who was sent to bring order to Ireland (where the Anglo-Normans were having  a lot of trouble), was inspecting the military installation he was having built at Durrow (where St. Columba had previously built a monastery), when he was murdered by one of the Irish who wanted him dead, by being hit on the head with an ax. So there you are. There is your crime. We discuss this, yes we do, but really we are discussing Hugh de Lacy because he built Trim Castle, and Michelle really really really wanted to talk about Trim Castle. So she does. We learn a lot about Anglo-Norman castles, really. But Anne still wonders about where the best place to hide your murder ax might be, because under your tunic just does not sound right.

In 1199, when Richard the Lionheart died, there were two possible claimants to the throne of England -- his younger brother John, and his nephew Arthur. John was a bit over 30 years old; Arthur was about 12. John, the youngest surviving son of Henry II, was by Norman law the rightful heir. Arthur, the eldest son of Geoffrey, John's older brother, was by the laws of Brittany, the rightful heir. Also, John was in England and Arthur was in Brittany. Also, John was the person who was, well, John. Ruthless, is what he was.  You can guess who it is who won, especially since you've already heard of King John and Arthur of Brittany sort of fell through the cracks of history. Except that the French really like him, and wrote a bunch of plays, and the Victorians loved him bunches because he was so pathetic. Michelle explains all that.

By the 15th century, Nuremberg was making a reputation and a lot of money out of being the main saffron import location in Europe. So the town burgesses took it very seriously when spice merchants sold saffron that wasn't fully saffron, but had various other things added to it. Very seriously indeed. So seriously that it was possible to be, as Johnanes Ryneken was, in 1444, executed for being a very bad spice merchant indeed. Anne especially enjoyed this episode, because she got to talk ALL about saffron, but Michelle was Quite Annoyed at the lack of scholarly citations. Also there was all that German. But there were some historical novels! With saffron!

The de Mariscos were a family that continually got into trouble, on account of continually misbehaving. When William de Marisco was executed at the Tower of London in 1242, it was ostensibly for attempting to have the king murdered, but since he'd also been pirating from the Isle of Lundy, and murdering messengers, he was going to end up being executed at some point anyway. Besides explaining the de Mariscos, we have two rabbit holes! Anne is fascinated by the Isle of Lundy, and Michelle is fascinated by Matthew Paris, and really, there's a lot going on in this episode.

Snorri Sturluson, the great Icelandic poet and historian and lawspeaker of the Althing, got involved in Norwegian/Icelandic politics, and it ended very badly. For him, for one thing, as the king of Norway arranged for 70 men to stab Snorri in his basement, and for Iceland, which devolved into chieftain battles and eventually unified with Norway and the Norwegian king became the boss of everything. The Althing still exists, though, and Iceland is independent now, and Snorri is one of the most influential poets of the early middle ages. We explain all this. Anne still wonders why you need 70 people to stab somebody in his basement, and Michelle is shocked, shocked, I tell you, that there isn't any historical fiction about all this, though she is slightly mollified by the fact that there is now a Snorri ap, for Android and IOS. Well, then.

If you go and peruse the internet, you will discover many discussions of the medieval shame flute, an instrument created specifically to be fastened to a bad musician, in order to shame him. There are pictures. There is a lot of certainty about this. Alas, it wasn't there. Michelle went to find them, and, though there are a couple of torture museums which have examples, those are not medieval examples. In fact, do we think that there were ever any shame flutes, even after the middle ages? We do not. Because we think, really, when bad musicians come to your town, you can just make them leave. And then not hire them any more. Michelle found some pretty nifty postcards, though, with lots of shaming devices, and you can buy them.  And send them to your friends. 

At the end of the 12th century, the kings of Ireland had been fighting amongst themselves, and the high king got involved, and what with one thing and another Diarmait Mac Murchada, who had been the king of Leinster, and then had been ousted, and then had gotten in again, got ousted again, and then had the very bad idea of getting help from the Anglo-Normans. And they did help, didn't they, and then they took Ireland over.  This could have been foreseen by anybody who had been paying attention to how the Normans operated.  Diarmait, at any rate, got to be king again, though not for long, and then he got to live in infamy as a great traitor.  For the  Irish. The English liked him better. Michelle gets even more exercised than usual, because 1) colonialism, very bad, and 2) some scholars she found, also very bad. 

One day in London in 1565, Richard Walweyn was arrested for wearing the wrong pants, and put in jail until he could prove he owned some proper ones. And why were these the wrong pants? Cause they were puffed out, and he was a servant. Makes no sense, right? Nah. But in times of unease, people like to try to get everybody to wear the right clothes, eat the right things, buy the right stuff. Whatever those things are that year. We discuss sumptuary laws over time, we discuss the hell which would be More's Utopia, if you found yourself living in it, and Michelle, bless her heart, found Italian Traveling Earrings.

In 1315, the crops throughout Europe failed. And then they failed the year after that. And then the year after that. It was raining.  And it rained and rained and rained. After that , it rained some more. One of the greatest natural disasters of the middle ages was the Great Famine, in which so many people of Europe died that the population didn't reach the level it had been before the rain started until the 19th century. Naturally, the crime rate rose. That's a fact. However, the cannibalism and infanticide stories, though they were very well known, don't have any evidence. Despite Hansel and Gretel. So we figured there was a rise in theft, and a rise in piracy, but not widespread cannibalism.  Michelle found a very good book. And a very bad one.

Before Davy Gam got famous amongst the English for helping out at Agincourt and getting knighted, and being in general an acceptable Welshman on account of helping out the English and fighting Welshmen, he had killed a kinsman in Brecon, had fought under John of Gaunt, and had fought against Owain Glyndŵr, the leader of the last great Welsh rebellion and the last Welsh Prince of Wales. As you can imagine, a Welshman famous amongst the English for bravely serving them and fighting at Agincourt is not necessarily a Welsh hero. But! He gives Anne an excuse for talking about Owain Glyndŵr, and Michelle an excuse for explaining why John Powys is not as good an author as Tolkien. Also, we discuss how it is that families in an occupied country might well find themselves on different sides of a conflict. 

Once upon a time, a group of parishioners in a village in Saxony danced in the churchyard during Christmas Mass, and so the priest cursed them and then they danced without ceasing for a year. This story was told, with variations, throughout Europe, from the 10th century (at least) through the 16th century. And! It really happened! Ok, not the dancing without ceasing for a year part, but the dancing without being able to stop? That really happened. From the 14th through the 17th century, groups of people throughout Europe would start dancing maniacally, and be unable to stop. Sometimes they did this till they died. And we still don't know why this occurred, though it is recognized as a Thing That Really Happened. We discuss dancing mania, the cursed carolers legends, and try to make sense of it all.  Happy Holidays!

A wave of anti-Semitism and atrocities against the Jews swept England starting in 1189, when Richard Lionheart was crowned, and mobs in London attacked the Jews in that city. The worst of the atrocities happened in York, when the local mobs burnt and pillaged Jewish homes; when the Jews retreated to the castle keep (they were, theoretically and legally, under the protection of the king), the York mob besieged the wooden keep with  stones, and murdered some of the Jews, having lured them out of the keep with the promise of safety if they converted. The Jews of York committed suicide, and burnt down the keep. Lately, work has been done to create an honorable, respectful, and informative permanent exhibit, making sure that this piece of York history is known and remembered. Michelle, having found no operas and novels featuring this atrocity, explains the history of York castle. And also Henry III's toilet.

Special Episode! It's the third birthday of True Crime Medieval, but, more importantly really, it's the 417th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot not actually coming off; if it had, not only King James and all of Parliament would have been destroyed, but also several blocks around, including Westminster Abbey.  We discuss the Plot, why it didn't work, what's been going on with November 5th celebrations since then, and, because Michelle finds this stuff, Edgar Allan Poe and his hatred for William Harrison Ainsworth's historical novel about the whole affair. 

King Alboin was a very successful king of the Lombards, and conquered the Gepids, and took Rosamund, the daughter of the king of the Gepids, as his wife, and everything was great, but then Rosamund murdered him, with the help of her lover. She was probably not very happy about the marriage, since she was still mourning the deaths of her father and her grandfather and her brother, so probably being married to the guy that killed them wasn't fun. The story got embellished pretty quickly; Alboin made Rosamund drink out of the skull of her father, for instance -- nice detail but your hosts don't believe it happened. As time went on, the story stopped being about Alboin and started being about Rosamund. Michelle watched an entire  movie from 1961, and says we should not do that, but she gives us a link anyway. Just in case.

Blanca, the rescue Goffin's Cockatoo, is a guest cohost on this episode, about that time that Olaf, before he was king of anything, whacked Klerkon, the viking who had enslaved him when he was a toddler. We discuss the Kyivan Rus, Novgorod, Vikings, blood money, the sagas, and, to Anne's surprise, Longfellow.  Blanca the Cockatoo has a lot to say. We don't know why. Also we don't know what she was saying.

So, one day in 1230, William de Braose was over at Llewelyn the Great's castle, and he was found in Llewelyn's private chambers with Joan, who was Llewelyn's wife. As well as the daughter of the King of England. Now, according to Welsh law, Llewelyn would then have been in his rights to beat William up, but instead, there was a trial, and William ended up being hung from some tree or other; two are in the running for being The Tree, but who knows. At any rate, messing around with the Queen did not carry the death penalty in Wales, but Llewelyn hung him anyway, and then wrote to his widow to see if she still wanted their children to get married. And she did, so they were. And what scandalizes Michelle most about all this is that the de Braoses and the relatives of Llewelyn were so intermarried that you don't know what to call their various relations. Also, that William and Joan and Llewelyn were all middle aged and not teenagers and really there is no excuse for all this.

Laws regulating war crimes have existed since ancient times, and trials of people who have committed them have existed as well; the trial of Peter von Hagenbach wasn't unusual for being a trial to judge whether he has violated laws of war when he was holding down Breisach for Charles the Bold; it was unusual because it was an international trial, and because part of the judgement included the decree that if soldiers are given orders they know to be wrong, they are culpable if they follow those orders. The trial would be cited as precedent for the Nuremberg trials after World War II. We discuss the trial, we discuss war crimes, and Michelle presents a children's book which posits von Hagenbach as a hero to be emulated. We are both scandalized.

Henry of Trastámara, of Henry of Castile, the Fratricidal, was not as friendly with the Jews of Spain as his half-brother, Pedro the Cruel, or Pedro the Just (depending on your interpretation of him) had been. He's "The Fratricidal," by the way, because he murdered his half-brother Pedro the Cruel or Just.  Henry wasn't yet king in 1355 -- that is, he hadn't murdered his half-brother yet -- but was at war with him, and wherever Henry took some power, Jews were murdered.  The massacre at Toledo was the beginning of his crimes against the Jews; Toledo was important as a center of Jewish intellectual and religious life in Spain. So we explain this, and the background, of course. And Michelle found a recipe for medieval Challah. So there's that.

After a short (he was 18) but eventful and busy life, Lambert, King of Italy and Holy Roman Emperor, was assassinated during a boar hunt. That's one rumor. The other rumor is that he fell off his horse and died. Evidence? Witnesses? Nah, not really. But we both have an opinion on this, which is that a story that has a king sleeping on the ground during a boar hunt is fundamentally flawed, and we don't buy it.  On the other hand, Michelle found two translations of the chronicle which tells us these rumors, so she had a very good time.

In 1343, Olivier de Clisson, who had backed the wrong candidate for the then empty Duke of Brittany position, as far as the king of France was concerned, was invited to a tournament, and then seized and executed for treason without a trial.  This greatly angered his wife, Jeanne, so she gathered a troupe of men and harassed the French, becoming quite beloved by the English, who were fighting France, in the beginning of the Hundred Years War. She also became a pirate, more or less. At least, she was attacking French ships and slaughtering Frenchmen. We discuss the question of piracy and what it is, really; and Michelle laments having had only Disney princesses as role models, in her youth, since apparently Jeanne would have been a much better model of womanly behavior.

In 1284, the children of Hamelin disappeared. Unless you translate the Latin differently, and they all died. Over the centuries, the story of what happened to them would get more and more intricate. Was there a Pied Piper involved? Probably not, though there may have been a musician. Were there rats? Nah. They don't show up in the stories for a few hundred years. But something happened, as the Hamelin chronicles tell us. What the hell it was we don't know. We explain the possible fates of the children of Hamelin, as invented over the centuries, and Michelle raves about the ways in which the town of Hamelin is currently cashing in on the legend. 

Capturing an enemy and holding them for ransom, in the middle ages, wasn't necessarily a crime. However, kidnapping a fellow crusader was not ok, since the pope has said that all the crusaders were supposed to treat each other well (by not capturing their lands and goods while they were off fighting, or kidnapping them and holding them for ransom), and also, there's a difference between holding a fellow noble for ransom and kidnapping the king of England. To be truthful, as far as medieval crimes go, this one isn't very criminal -- just sort of dumb, and tacky, but it gives a chance to discuss the rehabilitation of Richard's reputation (he wasn't a horrible king! he was ok!) and the importance of historical fiction. 

In 1210, King John of England left Maud de Braose and her son William in Corfe Castle and let them starve to death, either because Maud had been shirty with one of his messengers, or because John owed William money and didn't want to pay it back, or because, well, who knows.  John was like that.  Maud, on the other hand, had, before getting thrown into the dungeon at Corfe Castle, had impressed the Welsh by defending a castle against them, and, apparently, or at least the Welsh said so, magically building a castle in one night all by herself. In this episode, we discuss the horrible badness of King John, and why it's not a good idea to learn history from Disney movies.