True Crime Medieval

Surely all of us can understand how infuriating it can be when a neighbor builds some damn thing or other that blocks our view.  And then won't take it down. And maybe even laughs. What to do? Take the case to court, obviously. But what if we lose the case, on account of our view-blocking neighbor is a lawyer? Well. We can resort to harassment. With maybe a machine we build that makes the nei...

In April, 1321, the lepers of Southern France found themselves accused of poisoning the community wells, with some sort of powder. They were, the theory went, attempting to spread leprosy to the rest of the population. They weren't doing that, or anything like that, but they were tortured and executed, and the leprosaria, the houses where they lived, were taken over, and all of the goods and...

It's our April Fools' Episode, in which we explain how it is we know that things purported to have existed in the Middle Ages did not actually exist! It's late, for April Fools' Day, by any known calendar, since it's the end of June, and also the Bisley Boy, who did not exist, did his not existing after the Middle Ages, thereby qualifying this episode as a Special Episode....

In this episode, True Crime Medieval brings you two crimes, a father and son, both murdered in churches, though for different reasons altogether. Canute had enraged the peasants and nobility both, by enforcing the collection of tithes, while Charles had infuriated a badly behaved but powerful family which took it amiss when Charles attempted to make them stop gouging peasants during a famine. Mich...

Béla of Macsó was still in his twenties when he went to a meeting on Margaret Island (which is in the middle of the Danube, in Budapest), which wasn't a meeting at all, but a trap. There had been fairly complicated struggles for power in Hungary among members of a strikingly dysfunctional family -- Béla's grandfather, the king, had caused problems, handing out lands to his children, and...

In the medieval scriptoria, amongst all the holy books, and the hagiographies, and the books of philosophy, and the legal charters, not to mention the beautiful illuminated manuscripts, there were often, we are sorry to tell you, forgeries being created. Sometimes monasteries needed to codify some history that hadn't gotten written down when it happened, or to provide documentation of some la...

The Vikings impacted European history -- west and east -- for centuries, from 793, when they attacked Lindisfarne Abbey in England, up until 1066, when they attacked England and lost to Harold Godwinson (though Harold would lose the next battle, at Hastings, in his fight against the Normans or, "French Vikings," as your hosts like to call them).  These dates aren't really true, sinc...

As far as we are concerned, a book entitled "Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land," is, obviously, a book to read. To our joy, that book is informed, and readable, and full of Things We Did Not Know. And to our further joy, the author, Steve Tibble, who came to talk to us for this episode, is engaging, deeply informed, and kind hearted, and, of course, full of...

To be fair, the Vikings attacked Paris several times, but it's the major sieges that get remembered -- the one in 845, when they invaded Paris on Easter Sunday, got bought off with a fairly large ransom, and then the one that started in 885 and ended in 886, after nearly a year of a siege wherein the Vikings,  branching out from their usual plundering, used catapults and battering rams and ot...

If you were living in Western Europe in the late middle ages and early modern age, you might well come across partly eaten humans, whilst walking around in the woods, or even, alas, strolling in Paris. OBVIOUSLY these partly eaten humans had been attacked by werewolves! Duh! There were a lot of real wolves roaming around,  attacking humans, if the wolves had rabies, or there was a widespread famin...

The battle of Agincourt was almost over when Henry V ordered the prisoners killed. Nowadays, this would clearly be a war crime, but in 1415, it wasn't, though nobody liked it. Henry did not expect to win the battle, which involved a fairly small bunch of muddy unarmored Englishmen with dysentery up against a formidable line of armored Frenchmen on horses. So he didn't know, when a group...

Columbus's first trip to what would be called the Americas, in 1492, was a difficult one. Nobody thought he would actually get anywhere, since he had grossly underestimated the size of the globe, but the Spanish monarchs had some extra cash, since the war with the Moors was over, and thought they might as well fund the enterprise, because otherwise one of the other European countries was goin...

In the early 16th century, the peasants of Central Europe were being overtaxed, overworked, and underfed, and the lords of the lands kept making things worse. Things worsened, after which they worsened some more, snails got involved, and then there was the biggest peasant revolt in Europe before the French Revolution. If you're a native English speaker, and you haven't heard of it, great...

The Knights Hospitaler and the Ottoman Troops of Suleiman the Magnificent were well matched, with state-of-the-art cannonry and defenses, but it was Suleiman who commanded the Janissaries, the formidable household infantry troops loyal to the Sultan. Occasionally, though, they got out of hand; briefly, during the second truce after the second Siege of Rhodes, they entered the city and did things t...

If you wanted to steal beehives in the Middle Ages, you would need to be very good at the theft, because the laws about bees and beehives were many and varied, all over the European continent. And you should be really careful about stealing beehives in Portugal (or France, or Spain), because those were the places where the high-end honey got made, and the people there were very serious about their...

If you read the Annals of Tigernach , you will find that Máel Brigte mac Mothlachán killed Rogallach mac Uatach, King of Connacht, in battle, because the Uí Briúin tribe had been encroaching on the territory of the Corco Cullu, and so it was one of those normal murders. However, if you read the renowned and beloved Geoffrey Keating, you will discover that no, Rogallach, riding his white horse, was...

The first ruler of the House of Sverker, Sverker the Elder, had come out as the winner among contenders for the position of Ruler of Sweden, even though he wasn't from royal roots.  He was the ruler of the country, but various pieces of Sweden were considering themselves under or not under his authority, and other countries altogether were also working on taking Sweden or bits of it (that wou...

In the beginning, by which I mean before 1054, the Church was united, though the Eastern and Western pieces had lots of theological differences, which they could just not iron out. But then it was 1053, and the Patriarch of Constantinople closed all the Latin churches in the city, and after that, the Pope of Rome tried to get the Patriarch to recognize him (the Pope) as the head of the Church, whi...

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 Hord...

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 versi...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 probab...