Atrocities and Executions of the Peasant Re bei Leaders in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Atrocities and Executions of the Peasant Re bei Leaders
in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
*
Paul Freedman
In the spting and summer of 1 5 14, peasants in Hungary launched a revolt
against the rulers of the kingdom. A ct-usade preached against the Turks by the
cardinal-archbishop of Esztergom tumed into a holy war against the Hungarian
nobles whom the peasants accused of betraying the Christian cause by
continuing their exploitative lordship and refusing to make any effort to defend
the realm. After two months the rebellion was put down by Janos Zapolya, the
governor (voivod) of Transylvania, who defeated the peasant army near Temesvär
(modern Timasoara in Romania). The peasant commander, a member of the
minor nobility known alternatively as György D6zsa or Georg Zecke!, was
captured and about ten days thereafter (on or near July 25) executed in a manner
so stunningly barbaraus that across Europe contemporaries, inured though they
were to gmesome pub1ic spectacles, took notice. D6zsa was placed on an iron
throne which was then heated while a red-hot iron circlet was placed on his head
in a mock coronation ceremony. Still alive, the partially roasted D6zsa was then
removed from the throne and his followers, who bad been starved for this
purpose, were forced to eat bis flesh. Two who dernurred were immediately dispatched.
D6zsa’s remains were then quartered and sent around Hungary for
display.1
In a letter dated July 3 1 , 1 5 14, the Bamberg cathedral canon Lorenz Beheim
wrote to the Nurernberg humanist Willibald Pirckheimer condemning the
tortm·es and executions meted out to peasants which, he said, would have been
* This contribution is a modified version of the author’s study „Atrocities and Executions of
the Peasant Rebe! Leaders in Late Medieval and Early Modem Europe,“ Medievalia et
Humanistica: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture 31 (2005): I 0 1 – 1 3 .
1 Documents concerning the Htmgarian Peasants‘ War are collected in: Monumenta ntsticorum
in Hungaria rebellium, ed. Antonius Fekete Nagy et al. (Budapest: Akademiai
Kiad6, 1979). Most of the secondary Iiterature is in Hungarian, but see Gabor Barta, „Der
ungarische Bauernkrieg vom Jahre 1 5 1 4,“ in Aus der Geschichte der ostmitteleuropäischen
Bauernbewegungen im XVI.-XVJI Jahrhundert, ed. Gusztäv Heckenast (Budapest: Akademiai
Kiad66, 1 977), 63-69; Peter Gunst, „Der ungarische Bauernaufstand von 1 5 14,“ in:
Revolte und Revolution in Europa, ed. Peter Blickle (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1 975), 62-83;
Norman Housely, „Crusading as Social Revolt: The Hungarian Peasant Uprising of 1 514,“
Journal of Ecclesiastical Histmy 49 (1998): 1-28; Paul Freedman, „The Hungarian Peasant
Revolt of 1514,“ in: Grafenauerjev Zbornik (Ljubljana: SAZU, 1996), 43 1-46.
73
more justly applied to robber barons of Franconia.2 Even those who denounced
the violence and defiance of the Hungarian rebels fett uneasy about the savagery
ofthe repression. Giovanni Vitale, an ltalian tiving in centrat Europe, wrote to a
Roman friend later in 1 5 14, describing D6zsa’s end as frightful (atrox) but
ultimately merited.3 Zapolya hirnself is reputed to have felt guilt over this deed
and legend has it that he was unable ever again to see the elevated host at mass.
The execution of D6zsa was long remembered, if not with complete
accuracy. Michel de Montaigne, writing seventy years later, used this incident
(which he Jocated in Poland), as an example of officially sanctioned cruelty.4 In
The Tragedy of Hoffman, an English play performed at the beginning of the
seventeenth centmy, the protagonist avenges the torture and execution of his
father by the „duke of Luninberge“ by killing the duke’s son Otho by means ofa
burning crown.5
The denouement to the Hungarian uprising is a sta.rtling example of ludic,
camivalesque inversion, not in the hands of the lower orders mocking their
superiors but as a dramatization of seigneurial domination. In what follows I
will discuss the irnplications of this quasi-official atrocity and point to some
similar if not quite so spectacular incidents with different sorts of perpetrators
and victirns.
As is well-known, Jate rnedieval and early modern Europe saw frequent
and elaborate public acts of totture and execution. Often these were stiftly
choreographed events whose solemnity and meticulous preparation made the
infliction of rnutilation and death more horrifyingly impressive. The auto da je
of the Spanish Inquisition or the guillotine of the French Revolution were
punctilious and ritualized, but the dignity of the official cerernonial was accompanied
by hurniliating clothes, the turnbrel or other expressions of contempt
for the condernned. While exceptional individuals might merit a certain paradoxical
deference at execution (condemned royal officials in fifteenth-century
France being garbed in their robes of state on the way to the scaffold, for
exarnple),6 it was rnore often thought necessary to dramatize the abjectness of
the condemned whose evil deeds had separated him from the world of the Jiving
2 Siegfried Hoyer, „Der ungarische Bauernkrieg in deutschen Flugschriften und Chroniken,“
in Ostmitteleuropäische Bauernbewegungen, 464.
3 Monumema rusticorum, 245 (no. 200). A similar conclusion was reached by the ltalian
lüstorian of Hungary, Gian Micheie Bruto, in the later sixteenth century: Brutus Janos
Mihaly, Magyar Historiaja, 1490-1552, ed. Ferencz Toldy, Monumenta Hungariae Historia
Xll, vol. 1 (Pest: Ferdinand Eggenberger, 1 863), 372-76.
4 Laszlo Bati, „Montaignes Aufzeichnung über György D6zsas Tod,“ in: Ostmitteleuropäische
Bauernbewegungen, 457-60.
5 Henry Chettle, The Tragedy of Hofmf an or A Revengefor a Father (London: LN. for Hugh
Perry, 1631; repr. Oxford: Malone Society, 1951), lines 1 52-234. I am grateful to Sara
Lipton for pointing this out to me.
6 Examples in: Johann Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (New York: Doubleday,
1954), 1 1-12.
74
even before undergoing the final punishment. 7
At Temesvar there was plenty of ceremony, but the emphasis was on
mock seriousness and grotesquely festive reversal. The first surviving report of
the execution is in a rather cheerful letter from the normally melancholic king of
Hungary and Bohemia, Vladislav II. Writing to the imperial legate, Vladislav
says that this Zecke! (as he calls him) was apprehended on the Feast of the
Division of the Apostles (July 1 5). He describes the details of the execution and
adds that it was quite appropriate that Zeckel ’s entourage, whom the rebel leader
used to refer to affectionately as his „beasts,“ should have been forced to eat
him. The violence is implicitly justified by the resulting dispersion of the
peasants without nll1her bloodshed.8 A contemporary Gennan account reports
that while the execution scene was being set up, pipes and violins played and as
D6zsa was roasted, dancing monks sang a Te Deum.9 The illustrated title page to
this pamphlet shows in rather schematic form D6zsa crowned and on the throne,
one man biting his upper am1. The tableau is flanked by two musicians, one
playing a wind and another stringed instrument. The scene is surprisingly static,
even tranquil. The woodcut appears to have circulated independently and its
implications contradict the rather hostile text of the pamphlet. Without the
gestures and actions of the accompanying three figures, D6zsa could easily be
confused with Christ as the Man of Sotrows. In Iate-rnedieval representations
Christ is seated while being mocked, tonnented and crowned with thoms by his
executioners.10 Indeed, D6zsa would come to be regarded as a martyr especially
7 On the symbolism and meaning of public torture and execution, see Mitchell B. Merback,
The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and
Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). On notions of cmelty,
Daniel Baraz, Medieval Cruelty: Changing Perception, Late Antiquity to the Early Modern
Period (lthaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
8 Letter of Vladislav li to Nicolai Szekely de Kövend in Monumenta rusticorum, 1 75-76 (no.
142): Qui quidem Georgius Zekel ignito primum ferro coronatus es/, deinde nudo corpore
ligatus ad pedes a suis mi/itibus, quos haydones Hungra lingua vocant, quarum opera tot
tantaque mala perpetraverat et quos tarn ioco quam serio bestias vocitare consueverat
vivus dentibus discerplUs et devoratus est. Postrema cadaver in quatuor partes dissecturn
patibulo suspensum est. Hoc genere mortis et vitam et crudelitatem suam terminavit. Et hoc
pacto Iota illa rusticorum turba sub Themeswar absque sanguinis effusione dissipata est et
tumultus sedata.
9 Die auffntr so geschehen ist im Ungerlandt mit den Creutzern, vund auch darbey wie man
den Creutzer Haubtman hat gefangen unnd getödt (Nuremberg, 1 5 1 4 ). Copies of this rare
pamphlet are in Budapest, Magyar Tudomanyos Akademia Könyvtara, RM IV 88;
Budapest, Szecbenyi Library, Röp 18b (photocopy); Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
[d escribed in Ungarische Drucke und Hungarica I 480- 1 72 0, Katalog der Herzog
August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, ed. S. Katalin Nemeth, vol. l (Munich, 1993), 23].
10 Mariana D. Birnbaum, „A Mock Cavalry in 1514? The D6zsa Passion,“ in: European
Iconography East and West: Selected Papers ofthe Szeged International Conference June
9-12, 1993, ed. György E . Szonyi (Leiden: E . J. Brill, 1 996), figure 2 and her commentary,
97-98. A cycle of paintings by Giovanni Canavesio at the church of Notre-Dame de Fontaines
at La Brigue (Provence) present Christ in tab1eaux similar to the woodcut of D6sza ’s
torment. Canavesio based his representation of Christ being tortured and crowned with
75
among Franciscans and in popular legend and a chapel in his honor was
eventually constructed on the site ofhis execution, the marketplace at Temesvar.
A more chaotic scene is depicted in another illustration dating from five
years after the event. Here as trumpets play, crowds of figures bite or tom1ent
the agonized D6zsa. In the background tlU’ee men are impaled on standing poles,
while another lies skewered on the ground at D6zsa’s feet preparatory to being
raised up as weil. Mockery and camivalesque inversion set an especially horrifying
example or indicated martyrdom, two opposed but in some sense complementary
uses and implications of cruelty. Stories of Christian martyrdom
included not only endless torture but humiliation. Nowhere was this more
detailed or frequently repeated than in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century depictions
of the crucifixion.11
What is particularly interesting is that the complicated iconography of
D6zsa’s execution was more a pastiche of already-established elements of
savagery, reversal and mockery than a ceremony invented for the occasion.
Punishing rebels against royal authority by means of iron thrones or crowns,
coerced cannibalism, and the allusion to both martyrdom andjust punishment all
had fairly well-established precedents in 1 5 1 4 and some subsequent hist01y as
weil. This is not to say that Zapolya and his associates ransacked avai1able
chronicles for ideas before deciding on the method of dispatehing their captive
but quite the reverse: that as the exercise was supposed to serve as a memorable
example to discourage other would-be rebels, it had to coiTespond to a recognizable
symbolic language.
There was an obvious logic to including a hwniliating mock crowning in
the punishment meted out to rebels and traitors. The Biblical crown of thoms or
the paper crown placed on the head of the captured Duke of York in Shakespeare’s
Henry VI, part 3 are famous examples. To go a step further and make the
crown the actual instnunent of death might have struck those performing the
execution as peculiarly appropriate. ln 1 1 97, over tlu·ee hundred years before the
Hungarian rebellion, the Emperor Henry VI suppressed an uprising of Sicilian
nobles and ordered that a red-hot crown be nailed to the head of the ringleader
who bad claimed the title of king of Sici1y.12 Later the mock coronation/ execution
was deemed even more appropriate to inflict on 1ower-class rebe1s who
dared usurp powers that belonged to the royal authority. Jacques Calle, one of
the Ieaders of the French Jacquerie of 1 358, ·was captured by the King of
NavaiTe and placed nude on a bot piece of iron while his head was crowned by a
buming iron circlet. Thus, according to the Anonimalle Chronicle he finished his
thoms on a painring (ca. 1480) of the crowning by Israhel van Meckenem now in the
National Gallery in Washington. See Veronique Plesch, „Not Only Against the Jews: Antisemitic
lconography and its Functions at La Brigue,“ Studies in Jconography 23 (2002):
144-50.
11 Merback, The Thief. the Cross and the Wheel, especially 1 1 – 1 00.
12 David Abulafia, Frederick 11, a Medieval Emperor (London: Allen Laue, 1 988), 85.
76
evil life as an example to others.13
The suppression of a peasant uprising that spread across parts of Croatia
and Slovenia in I 573 included putting to death a rebel Ieader, a certain Matija
Gubec, by means of the hot iron crown (without any sort of throne in this case).
George Draskovic, archbishop of Zagreb and imperial ban of the region, wrote
to the Emperor Maximilian II asking for permission to put this punishrnent into
effect. In his Ietter he refers to the rebel Ieader derisively as „Gubecz Beg,“ the
use of a Turkish honorific implying apostasy in addition to treason. The punishment,
once again, is stated as intended to serve as an example to others. 14 Here
the claim is made that Gubec declared hirnself king, an unlikely event unsupported
in any other source, but an assertion that legitimated the mock coronation.
The punishment is another camivalesque inversion in which impudent pretense
is savagely but comically (and, in the eycs of the executioners, appropriately)
repressed.
In at least one instance the same manner of killing was performed by
peasants against an unfortunate random member of the upper classes (or at least
a plausible story was circulated to that effect). Peasant bands known as
„Tuchins“ in Artois and Picardy revolted in 1 3 84. Among their supposed atrocities
was the execution of a hapless Scottish squire named (somewhat generically)
John Patrick. He had the misfortune to be caught by the rebels who had
determined to kill anyone they came across who possessed courtly or urban
speech, manners or affect. As a practical test, those whose hands were not calloused
by manual Iabor were to be executed. Failing that test, John Patrick was
dispatched by being „crowned“ with a burning tripod. 15
Peasant atrocities, or more accurately stories of peasant atrocities, tended
13 The Anonimalle Chronicle, ed. V. H. Galbraith (Manchester, 1927), 42: Et le dit Jak
pristrent et mistrent a sa penaunce pur sa mauveite et luy fieren/ sere tite new sour une
treschaude et ardaunt tresde de ferre; et une autre chaude et ardaunt tresde mystrent sur
saunt lest en lieu de coroune, et issinr Jinyst sa mauveys vie a ensample des autres.
14 In Franjo Racki, „Hrvatsko-Slovenska seljacka buna“ (The Croatian-Slovenian peasant
revolt), Starine 7 ( 1 875): 2 1 2 : Quendam ex ipsis, Gubecz Begum voca/um et noviter regem
nominatum, ferrea eaque candenti corona, si Maiestatis V. S. voluntas accesserit, in
aliorum exemplum coronabimus. I am grateful to Oto Luthar for this reference and to Jane
Miles for translating portions of Bogo Grafenauer, Boj za staro pravdo na slovenskem 15.
in 16 stoletju (The struggle for the Old Right in 1 51h and l 61h-century Slovenia) (Ljubljana:
Diiavna zalozba Slovenije, 1 974) and Ignacij Voje, Nemirno Balkan: zgodovinski pregled
od 6. do 18. stoletja (Balkan unrest: an historical overview from the 6’h to the 1 8’h century)
(Ljubljana: Driavna zalozba Slovenije, 1 994), 224-27.
u Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys, ed. M. L. Bellaguet, vol. I (Paris: L’Imprimerie de
Crapelet, 1 8 39), 308-10: Exequturum facinorosum edictum [i.e., that those with uncalloused
hands be killed) omnes jurant; et quamvis inde muttos peremerint, quarum nomina
non tenentur, tarnen a fide dignis comperii, quod quemdam insignem armigerum, Scotum
nacione, ad regem Arragonie destinatum, Johannem Patricii nomine, ceperunt, duranie
rabie, quem cum tripode ardenli coronantes nequiter inlelfecerunt. On this revolt see
Vincent Challet, „La revolte des Tuchins: banditisme social ou sociabilite villageoise?“
Miidievales 34 ( 1 986): I 0 1 – 1 2 .
77
to involve a frenzied inversion of authority in which a generally chaotic expression
of supposed bestial violence was dramatized by a savage symbolism.
Rapes, murder, cannibalism, roasting, are all topoi of peasant rebellion as
described by literate contemporaries. Hungarian peasants in 1 5 1 4 were labeled
in one alarmed account crucifzxores (crucifiers) who call themselves cruciferos
(crusaders, those bearing the cross): perpetrators of terrible atrocities posing as
defenders of Christ. This Ietter, by four provincial govemors to a fifth, warns of
the „rage“ and „furor“ of the peasants that will, if unchecked, not only lead to
the extermination of the noble Ieaders but the barbaraus rape and murder of their
families. 16 The peasants‘ rage is a species of natural force or innate savagery that
has now, according to this Ietter, „boiled over“ (e.fferbuit). Similarly Giovanni
Vitale says that although the movement began as a sincere crusade, it degenerated
into wild and random violence, especially rape and torture which are
emblematic peasant atrocities. Vitale specifically mentions impaling nobles before
the eyes of their wives and children, or raping the wives while their husbands
were forced to watch. These are not Iandlords killed by their tenants but,
as with the account of Tuehin violence, unfortunate members of a hated class
who ha ve fallen into the hands of the rebels. 17
The French Jacquerie of 1 358 is probably the locus classicus for medieval
stories of peasant atrocities. According the account of the chronicler Jean Je Bel,
a knight was murdered by peasants who then forced his wife and children to
watch as he was roasted. After raping the wife, the rebels then forced her to eat
the knight‘ s flesh, and then she too was killed.18 The story was repeated by
Froissa11 whose chronicles would of course become known throughout Europe.
Writing at some distance from the event, Fraissart embellished slightly on Jean
le Bel ’s account, adding to the story of the roasted knight, for example, the detail
that he was tumed on a spit.19
The atrocious execution of D6zsa at Temesvar, therefore, mocked the
pretensions to rule by means of a ghastly coronation, and mimicked what wcre
regarded as canonical peasant atrocities, namely roasting and enforced canni-
16 Letter o f the counts ofN6gräd, Hont, Pest and Hcves to the count of Abauj, ed. Monumenta
rusticorum, 1 16 (no. 73): Quot homicidia, quot stupra et adu/teria quotque cedes et incendia
per maledietos sce/eratissimosque cruxifixores i/los, que se se cruciferos appe//abant,
sed crucis pocius Christi persecutores fuerant … 17
Monumenta rusticorum, 244 (no. 200): Evocati interdum quotquot nobi/ium vi apprehendere
possunt, eorum corpora acutissimi studibus transfodiunt ante uxorum et liberorum
oculos; neque hoc satis videtur vindictae, sed coram maritis miseras uxores stupro vio/ant
omnisque exercirus … 18
In Marie-Therese de Medeiros, Jacques et chroniqueurs: une titude comparee de recits
contemporains re/atant Ia Jacquerie de 1358 (Paris: H. Champion, 1979), 1 86: Je n ‚oseroie
escrire ne raconter /es horribles faiz ne /es inconveniens que faisoeient aux dames; mais,
entre /es au/tres deshonnestes faiz, i/s touerent ung cheva/ier et /e mirent en hast et /e
rostirent, voyant Ia dame et /es enfans. Aprez ce que X ou XII eurem enforcie Ia dame, i/
19 luy en vou/urentf air mengier parf orce, puis ilz lef irent morir de mal mort.
/bidem, 1 89.
78
balism.
Whether or not such peasant atrocities really took place is unlikely to be
demonstrated, these were what nobles believed peasants in rebellion customarily
did. And yet there are other precedents for this aspect of the horrific drama. In
1456 a crusade was led by Hunyadi to relieve the Turkish siege of Belgrade.
This anticipates the 1514 crusade in that here too peasant soldiers denounced the
nobi1ity for shirking their military and Christian obligations and continuing to
Jevy exactions to enrich themselves rather than contributing to the crusade.20
Also during this campaign, a conspiracy to betray the army to the Turks was
discovered and the ringleader was bumed at the stake after which his associates
were fo rced to eat his chaned remains.2 1
For the most part the atrocities I’ve described have a somewhat Stereotypie
post-Black Death aura. But the background to at least one of the symbolic
atrocities goes back further to accounts of Christian martyrdom, reminding us,
as with the iconography of D6zsa, that one side’s exemplmy punishment is another
side’s cxemplary resistance. The execution of a number of saints included
the imposition of a red-hot meta! cro-wn .22 This is especially true of the St.
Christopher legend. Christopher is best known for carrying the increasingly
heavy Christ child across a river, hence his status as the protector of travelers
until he was recently decommissioned by the Church. Often in the Eastem
churches, and less commonly in the West, he was a dog-headed saint whose
quasi-human status exhibited the care of God for even the most distant and unpromising
peoples.
Christopher is one of those saints whose martyrdom was Jong and drawn
out because t01tures that kill normal people left him untouched. Among these
torments was that he was placed on a glowing-hot iron stool or gridiron or
covered with a glowing iron mantle, and, especially in Western iconography, his
head was covercd with a similarly heated helmet.23 This is not necessarily a
mock coronation, it should be noted, because Christopher’s attributcd crime was
not a claim to any sort of political authority. His was a martyrdom that imitated
Christ’s sacrificial humiliation, so the association with the derisive crown of
thorns was logical.
An early text describing this aspect of Christopher’s passion is a fragment
of a martyrdom account contained in the Anglo-Saxon manuscript, BL Cotton
20 The evcnts of this crusade were observed by Giovanni de Tagliacozzo whose letters are
collected in Ludwig von Thall6czy and Antat A tdasy (eds.), Magyararszag mellektartomayainak
ok/eveltara 2 (Budapest, 1907). On the angcr against the nobles, sce Tagliacozzo’s
account in Luke Wadding, ed., Anna/es Mi norum seu trium ordinum a S. Francisco
institutorum 12/3 (Quaracchi: Tipografia Barbera, Alfani e Venturi, 1932), 793.
21 Birnbaum, „A Mock Calvary,“ 95.
22 Hippolyte Delehaye, Les passions des martyrs et /es genres litteraires (Brussels: Societe
des Bollandistes, 1921), 282-87.
23 Lexikon der Christlichen Ikonographie 5, 506; Hans-Friedrich Rosenfeld, „Der Heilige
Christophorus: Seine Verehrung und seine Legende,“ Acta Academiae Aboensis, Humaniora
1013 (1937): 358.
79
Vitellius A. xv which also has the unique copy of Beowulfand the collection of
exotica known as The Wonders ofthe East. In this incomplete saint’s life, Christopher
is tortured over several days and only dies on the third day by decapitation.
The fragment in Cotton Yitellius begins with his torture, but in other early
English accounts he begins as a dog-headed semi-human who is miraculously
transformed by his conversion and martyrdom. On the first day of his torture he
is enthroned on an iron seat set over a massive fire and crowned with a buming
helm, but this has no effect. 24 In The Golden Legend, which would enshrine
hagiographic images for future leamed and popular culture, Christopher first is
crowned with an iron helmet and then placed in an iron chair above a raging fire
fed by pitch, again to no avail.25 While artistic depictions of St. Christopher
usually show him carrying the Christ child, the details of his martyrdom were
also occasionally presented. A Romanesque painted altar frontal from twelfthcentury
Catalonia shows Christopher’s torture and death in panels surrotmding a
centrat representation of Christopher carrying Christ. In the lower left-hand
section, he is half-lying on the ground, surrounded by flames as an iron cap is
placed over his head at the order of the emperor while the hand of God protects
hI. ITI. 26
* * *
We’ve seen that various elements ofthe multi-atrocity execution of D6zsa
had separate precedents or afterlife: the iron crown, the throne, roasting, and
cannibalism. These were mingled with other horrible reputed deeds (such as
rape) in earlier instances. All the incidents, both official and spontaneous, were
in the nature of public spectacles, the public including not only those who were
supposed to take home an indelible lesson from the performance, but a smaller
humiliated „participating“ audience (family, followers) who had to witness the
atrocious cruelty or take part in it, or be similarly victimized in sequence. These
events were not simply outbreaks of frenzied peasant violence (although
chroniclers of peasant wars portray them this way), nor were they solely thcatrical
demonstrations of established power on thc order of the ceremonial
penances and executions already mentioned. The elements of atrocity were
borrowed and traveled back-and-forth between lower-class rebels and upperclass
enforcers of state authority and so mutually referential.
The cornmon people did not have a monopoly on the camivalesque
24 Joyce Tally Lionarons, „The Old English Legend of Saint Christopher,“ in: Marvels, Monsters
and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations, ed. Timothy S .
Jones and David A. Sprunger (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Press, 2002), 180. See also
the edition of an eighth-century passion of St. Christopher based on a Würzburg
(Universitätsbibliothek) manuscript in Rosenfeld, „Der Heilige Christophorus,“ 526, which
also refcrs to an iron helmet (cassidis).
25 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. William Granger Ryan, vol. 2 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press. 1 993), 14.
26 Barcelona, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, MNACIMAC 4370, Taula de Sant
CristOfol. I am grateful to Montserrat Pages Paretas for this information.
80
ceremonies of social reversal. We have learned from Bakhtin and of course from
historians such as Natalie Davis and Robert Darnton about the complex symbolic
order and representation inscribed in what were once dismissed as merely
excesses of bizarre, lower-class frenzy.27 The public infliction of torture and
mutilation, whether at the hands of a mob or the state, fulfills in a disturbing but
apposite ma􀌕mer the ludic qualities of the Camival and its association with the
all too malleable body.
What is perhaps more disturbing is the pleasure taken by the modern
public in the ritualized mutilation, murder and/or humiliation of victims of
officially sanctioned mob violence. The recent examples of Rwanda and Bosnia
demoostrate this. Lynchings in the early twentieth century American South were
family entertainment. Far from being secret atrocities, they spun off postcards
and other memorabilia.28 The 1938 Anschluss was marked in Vienna by forcing
elderly Jews scmb the sidewalks on their hands and knees. Daniel Goldhagen’s
book, although flawed in its interpretations and conclusions, nevertheless
presents evidence of the picnic-like atmosphere surrounding the burning of
villages, the hunt for Jews and their murder reported casually by perpetrators to
those back home?9 The „tetTible secret“ of the Holocaust, as Walter Laqueur
termed it, and the industrialized extermination of the camps existed alongside a
hideously theatricalized world of atrocities and a not-so-secret world of public
or inforrnally publicized spectacle in which the supposed atTogance or social
claims made by those considered subordinate were obsessively – symbolically
as weil as physically – extirpated.30
The atrocity of 1 5 14 is fairly isolated and limited in its impact compared
with modern instances of persecution and genocide, but it shows the ability of
the political authorities to participate in or imitate popular carnivalesque rites of
misrule and indicates that these rites were composed of multiple elements with a
complicated symbolic past.
27 Mikhai1 Bahktin, Rabelais and His World, trans. He1cne lswo1ski (Cambridge Mass.:
M.I.T. Press, 1968); Nata1ie Zernon Davis, Sociery and Culture in Early Modern France
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975); Roben Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and
other Episodes in French Cultural Histmy (New York: Vintage Books, 1984).
28 Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, ed. James Allen et al. (Santa Fe:
Twin Pa1ms, 2000).
29 Danie1 Go1dhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
(New York: A1fred A. Knopf, 1996).
30 Wa1ter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: An lnvestigation into the Suppression of lnfonnation
about Hitler’s „Final Solution“ (Boston: Litt1e Brown, 1980); lnga C1endinneo, Reading
the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 999).
8 1
AT THEEDGE OFTHE LAW
MEDIUM AEVUM QUOTIDIANUM
SONDERBAND XXVIII
At the Edge of the Law:
Socially Unacceptable and Illegal Behaviour
in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period
Edited by
Suzana Miljan
and
Gerhard Jaritz
Krems 2012
MIT UNTERSTÜTZUNG
DER ABTEILUNG KULTUR UND WISSENSCHAFT DES AMTES DER
NIEDERÖSTERREICHISCHEN LANDESREGIERUNG
KULTUR 1!\ NIEDERÖSTERREICH ‚W
Copy editor: Judith Rassan
Cover illustration:
Justitia: St Michael and the Virgin Mary
Pembroke College, Cambridge
(Photo: Mirko Sardelic)
Alle Rechte vorbehalten
-ISBN 978-3-901 094-30-X
Herausgeber: Medium Aevum Quotidianum. Gesellschaft zur Erforschung der materiellen
Kultur des Mittelalters, Körnennarkt 13, 3500 Krems, Österreich. Für den Inhalt verantwortlich
zeichnen die Autoren, ohne deren ausdrückliche Zustimmungjeglicher Nachdruck,
auch in Auszügen, nicht gestattet ist.
Druck: KOPJTU Ges. m. b. H., Wiedner Hauptstraße 8-10, 1050 Wien.
Table of Contents
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Damir Km·bic, The Thin Border Between Justice and Revenge,
Order and Disorder: Vraida (Enmity) and Institutional Violence
in Medieval Croatia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Marija Karbic, Women on the Wrong Side ofthe Law.
Some Examples from Medieval Urban Settlements
of the Sava and Drava Interomnium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1
Sabine Florence Fabijanec, Ludus zardorum:
Moral and Legal Frameworks of Gambling
along the Adriatics in the Middle Ages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 I
Gerhard Jaritz, Outer Appearance,
Late Medieval Public Space, and the Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Zoran Ladic, C1iminal Behaviour by Pilgrims
in the Middle Ag es and Early Modern Period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Paul Freedman, Atrocities and Executions
of the Peasant Rebe! Leaders
in Late Medieval and Early Modem Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Lovorka Coralic, Unacceptable Social Behaviour or False Accusations:
Croats in the lnvestigations of the Venetian Inquisition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
Slaven Bertosa, Robbers, Murderers, and Condemned Men in lstria
(from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
Preface
This publication contains selected papers from a conference held in
Zagreb (Centre for Croatian Studies, University of Zagreb) in 2009, dealing with
the medieval and early modem period, and translated into English for this
purpose. • The main goal was to gather papers on a topic that has not been
researched enough amongst Croatian historians, that is, the socially unacceptable
and illegal behaviour of individuals who were „walking at the edge of the
law.“ The general idea was also to present various research questions at the
intersection of social and legal history, from the problern of feuding in medieval
society to the various types of delinquency by pilgrims. The emphasis was put
on the Croatian territory in the Middle Ages (from Slavonia to lstria and Dalmatia)
and set in a broader (East) Centrat European context. The articles follow
a chronological sequence, starting from the High Middle Ages, with a particular
focus on the late medieval and early modern period.
The first paper is by Damir Karbic, who dcals with the use of violencc as
a means of obtaining justice and re-establishing order, which was one of the
peculiarities of the medieval legal system when compared with Roman law.
After presenting different cases of feuds in Croatian sources, he discusses, how
medieval communal legislation treated feuds as a separate legal institute, using
the example of the city statutes of Split.
Marija Karbic concentrates on the ways in which women from the
medieval urban settlements of the Sava and Drava interamnium came into
conflict with the law by various criminal actions, from insults or brawls to
abo11ion and murder. She connects those problems with the economic situation
of these women, basing the analysis mainly on theft and prostitution cases. The
women were sometimes punished severely, but sometimes pardoned or punished
minimally.
The problern of gambling along the eastem Adriatic coast is the research
subject of Sabine Florence Fabijanec. She analyses the urban statutory regulations
Stretching from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centUJy. She deals with the
adoption of legal provisions against gambling and shows the diversity of approach
to gambling from city to city.
Gerhard Jaritz analyses the interdependence between Jate medieval
material culture, human behaviour, religious discourse, and legal culture using
the example of actions connected with superbio that played a role in public
• The Croation version of the conference proceedings is publisbed as Suzana Miljan (ed.), Na
rubu zakona: dru§tveno i pravno neprihvatljiva pona§anja kroz povijest, Biblioteka Dies
historiae, vol. 3 (Zagrcb: Hrvatski studiji, 2009).
7
urban arguments. The secular authorities emphasized moral, national, and religious
components, highlighting the necessity of averting God’s wrath.
The perception of the behaviour of pilgrims is the topic of Zoran LadiC’s
contribution. He shows, in cantrast to the idealized vision of pilgrimages and
pilgrims, that pilgrimages made by average medieval or early modem believers
were also considered superstition and that the pilgtims often engaged in fights,
robberies, prostitution, and other forrns of delinquent behaviour.
Paul Freedman offers an ariicle on late medieval and early modem public
acts of torture and execution, which were carefully choreographed events whose
solemnity and meticulous preparation made the infliction of mutilation and
death horrifyingly impressive. He also concentrates on the various topoi of peasant
rebellion as described by literate contemporaries, such as rape, murder,
cannibalism, the roasting of victims, and so on.
Lovorka Coralic deals with Croats accused in the records of the Venetian
Inquisition. Four types of accusation can be recognized: conversion to Islam,
Protestantism, the use ofmagic, and conduct considered improper for clergymen
(priests and other mcmbers of religious orders).
The last article is by Slaven Bertosa, dealing with poor social conditions
in Istria in the early modem period that led to hunger, poverty, depopulation,
and generat insecurity, which in rum provoked dangeraus behaviour, robbery,
and murder. Capital crimes were under the jurisdiction of the Potesta and
Captain of Koper or, respcctively, the Captain of Raspor with his seat in Buzet.
The village communities were also starting to organize themselves by introducing
patrols, although in a modest way.
The collection of articles tries to popularise the topics for one plain
purpose, that is, to erase the border between history and legal studies, since until
now one carmot actually speak of „interdisciplinarity,“ but only of looking at
many research problems from various reference points. Hopefully, this volume
will be useful not only for historians dealing with this poorly researched topic of
(Croatian) historiography, but also for a wider public generally interested in the
functioning of the legal and social system in the past.
Finally, my special gratitude goes to Judith Rassou for copy editing the
volume and to Gerhard Jaritz for offering the opportunity to publish it as a
special issue of Medium Aevum Quotidianum, thus promoting this research on
an intemational level.
Suzana Miljan
8