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True Crime Medieval
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1000 years of people behaving badly.
108 Episodes
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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...
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...
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 wh...
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 wher...
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 Ord...
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 in...
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. Becau...
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 peopl...
1It 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 ...
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 ...
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 th...
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 ...
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 t...
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 he...
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 ...
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 Christ...
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 mi...
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...
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 rea...
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 Centu...
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 ...
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 assassin...
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 Ca...
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....
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 a...
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 f...
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 ...
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 ...
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 att...
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 woul...
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 cannib...
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...
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, group...
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 ...
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 W...
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 h...
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...
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 di...
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 thos...
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 massacr...
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 tell...
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 lea...
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...
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 cr...
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...
In 1386, Marguerite de Carrouges accused Jacques le Gris of having raped her, and though the French Parliament could not come to an agreement as to whether or not le Gris was guilty, we know that he was, because Marguerite's husband Jean killed le Gris in a trial by combat, so that's settled. Although le Gris' descendants would keep trying to convince everybody that actually somebody else raped her. The evidence for this was either nonexistent or unconvincing. The case is currently know...
The Irish Annals are full -- full, we tell you -- of detailed histories of the kings of Ireland. Only mostly the details are their names, how long they ruled, and how they died. Though Bran Ardchenn and Eithne were burned to death in a church, we don't know more than that. In this episode, we discuss early Irish history, the Book of Leinster, and Anne's annoyance at not knowing exactly how Bran and Eithne died. Because "burned to death" doesn't really explain much.
In 1478, in Florence, the banking family of the Medici was very powerful. Very powerful indeed. But another banking family, the Pazzi, were not happy with this. No, no! They wanted to be more powerful in Florence than the Medici were! So they created A Plan. Well, a few plans, really, but finally one of the plans was carried out, which was to kill two of the Medici at High Mass in the Cathedral, after which the citizens of Florence were going to say, yay! hoorah! Now the Pazzi wil...
In 1127, Stephen of Blois swore an oath that when Henry I, King of England, died, Stephen would support Henry's daughter (and Stephen's cousin), Empress Maud, as queen ruler of England. But in 1135, when Henry died, Stephen hightailed it to London and grabbed the throne. In this episode, we discuss the civil war that followed, and several interesting bits of it -- Empress Maud escapes from Oxford by walking over the iced river in a blizzard; Queen Matilda, Stephen's wife, manages to get...
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I've tried 4 times. The content and the history work is interesting. But one of the woman's antics make this podcast unlistenable. Random screaming, interrupting, attempting to do "funny" accents, generally acting like a 10 year old. Just tell the story, and share what you know.