Speaker 1: Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minky. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 1: One quick note before we begin. I wrote a book.
Speaker 1: It's a novel called Anatomy, a love story about a
Speaker 1: surgeon and a body snatcher in nineteen century Edinburgh. And
Speaker 1: if you like Noble Blood, I have a feeling that
Speaker 1: you're really really going to like it. I'm really proud
Speaker 1: of it, and I'm never proud of anything that I
Speaker 1: write anyway. It's available for preorder now, and preorder is
Speaker 1: extremely weird, you know, to buy a book that's not
Speaker 1: going to come out until February, but it's actually really
Speaker 1: important for authors. My publisher is going to look at
Speaker 1: those preorder numbers and make their decision based on them
Speaker 1: about where to put the book and how many eyeballs
Speaker 1: to put in front of. So if you're at all
Speaker 1: interested in the book, it would mean the world to
Speaker 1: me if you checked it out and maybe gave future
Speaker 1: you a surprise gift. If we are ever in the
Speaker 1: same city, I promise I will track you down and
Speaker 1: sign it for you. The link to the preorders is
Speaker 1: in the bio, and so now into the episode. This
Speaker 1: episode is a little bit different. It's our fifty episode
Speaker 1: of Noble Blood, and so rather than focus on just
Speaker 1: one story, I'm going to focus on five, five historical
Speaker 1: myths that, for whatever reason, have persisted to this day.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I think understanding which lies spread and why can
Speaker 1: be just as important as understanding the actual truth. So
Speaker 1: let's dive in. First up, it has to be. First up,
Speaker 1: it's most important. Let the meat cake. Everyone has heard
Speaker 1: this story. In fact, when you think about Marie Antoinette,
Speaker 1: it's probably the first thing that you think of. The
Speaker 1: story goes that starving peasants wearing their dustiest rags, gaunt
Speaker 1: with hunger and poverty, come to Versailles, the gilded palace,
Speaker 1: in which Marie Antoinette and her husband feasted on bond
Speaker 1: bonds under painted ceilings. Please, one of the peasants say,
Speaker 1: his giant eyes turned up hopefully towards the queen. The
Speaker 1: people of France don't have any bread to eat. Marie
Speaker 1: Antoinette rolls her eyes and sighs, annoyed that she has
Speaker 1: to look at a poor person. Her painted lips curled devilishly,
Speaker 1: and she replies, let them eat cake. As far as
Speaker 1: setups and punchlines go, there's practically nothing better. It's the
Speaker 1: catty bon moo equivalent of Lucille Bluth from Arrested Development
Speaker 1: thinking that a banana costs ten dollars. It's little wonder
Speaker 1: that the story caught on and on and on. This
Speaker 1: smith Bus thing is a double act. The first myth
Speaker 1: to bust is that, as pedants left to point out,
Speaker 1: Marie Antoinette would have actually said la brioche, which pardoning
Speaker 1: my awful French pronunciation, means let them eat brioche. Brioche
Speaker 1: refers to an incredibly rich bread made with butter and
Speaker 1: with eggs. It's as good as cake to an eighteenth
Speaker 1: century French peasant, and so Marie Antoinette saying let them
Speaker 1: eat brioche is basically just a more specific variation on
Speaker 1: the same punchline. But the more important correction is that
Speaker 1: Marie Antoinette never told peasants to eat cake or brioche,
Speaker 1: or croissant or any pastry. Before and during the French Revolution,
Speaker 1: Marie Antoinette became a scapegoat to represent all of the
Speaker 1: ills of the second estate, the ruling nobility of France,
Speaker 1: the elite upper class, not only would she the most
Speaker 1: visible consumer of the French royal family with her expensive
Speaker 1: clothes and elaborate hairstyles, but also she was foreign in Austrian,
Speaker 1: which meant that people were primed from the beginning to
Speaker 1: hate her. The first recorded variation on the quote let
Speaker 1: them eat cake story actually comes from a sixteenth century
Speaker 1: German story about a noblewoman who wonders aloud why poor
Speaker 1: people who can't afford bread just don't eat the pastry
Speaker 1: cross um. The story came to France two hundred years later,
Speaker 1: or at least it was popularized in Rousseau's Confessions, in
Speaker 1: which he attributes the quote to an anonymous princess, most
Speaker 1: likely just meaning it apocryphal lee. At the time that
Speaker 1: Rousseau was writing, Marie Antoinette was nine years old. She
Speaker 1: was the younger sister of princesses in Austria, not at
Speaker 1: all in line to be married to the Prince of France.
Speaker 1: Yet and Rousseau would not have cared at all what
Speaker 1: she was up to. The little preteen princess known as
Speaker 1: Maria Antonio was not spouting poetic about the French population
Speaker 1: and their lack of brioche consumption. I'm a known defender
Speaker 1: of Marie Antoinette, which seems like a strange thing to say,
Speaker 1: but I do think it's interesting and important to look
Speaker 1: at Marie Antoinette's life and role as it would have
Speaker 1: been established in the framework of eighteenth century French politics.
Speaker 1: She was told and raised to be the queen of
Speaker 1: a country from the age of fourteen. She was married
Speaker 1: to the Dafais France, and her role was not political.
Speaker 1: It wasn't her decision to make what the French people
Speaker 1: were taxed or what the government was spending its money on.
Speaker 1: Her role really was to wear clothes by French designers
Speaker 1: and spawn sir French hairstylists and throw parties and entertained diplomats.
Speaker 1: She was raised for a very specific role and purpose that, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: by the end of the eighteenth century became obsolete, and
Speaker 1: I would argue for good reason, but in her own
Speaker 1: tiny bubble raised her entire life in a elaborate court ritual,
Speaker 1: a tradition. Marie Antoinette, by all accounts, was a kind
Speaker 1: and generous person. There are stories of Marie Antoinette stopping
Speaker 1: her carriage because she saw a child on the side
Speaker 1: of the road, and then in effect adopting that child
Speaker 1: to pay for their education and comfortable lifestyle. As an individual,
Speaker 1: she was kind and tried to help poor people, but
Speaker 1: Marie Antoinette had no education, interest, or really even role
Speaker 1: when it came to helping the poor people of France
Speaker 1: as a whole. It's interesting also that she's painted as
Speaker 1: so out of touch and eliteau, which again she was.
Speaker 1: But Marie Antoinette, as an individual, loved this idea of
Speaker 1: painting herself as a farm girl or woman of the people.
Speaker 1: At Versailles, she built a tiny village that was meant
Speaker 1: to represent a French farm village, where she would shed
Speaker 1: all of the layers of her court finery, put on
Speaker 1: simple linen peasant wear, and in effect play poor person
Speaker 1: for an afternoon. She would milk goats and cows and
Speaker 1: take fresh eggs from chickens, although of course all of
Speaker 1: the fresh eggs that she was taking from chickens would
Speaker 1: have been removed prior to Marie Antoine, it coming wiped
Speaker 1: down of all the chicken viscera and then replaced underneath
Speaker 1: the chicken. It was basically a disnified version of what
Speaker 1: being a peasant was like. Now that I say it,
Speaker 1: I recognize how wildly out of touch that seems, but
Speaker 1: there's something almost quaint about it, I find. But of course,
Speaker 1: when the French Revolution came, she was the Queen of France,
Speaker 1: the female head of this incredibly destructive and archaic institution,
Speaker 1: and so that had had to quite literally roll. Rousseau's
Speaker 1: writing was incredibly influential to the revolutionaries who would overthrow
Speaker 1: Marie Antoinette and the entire French monarchy. So it's more
Speaker 1: than likely that they conflated his anecdotal story with their
Speaker 1: queen because it's so thematically perfect. But the debunking has
Speaker 1: been going on almost ever since. Fifty years after the
Speaker 1: French Revolution, a writer in the French journal leg Whip
Speaker 1: said that he could prove that the let Them Eat
Speaker 1: Cake rumor about Marie Antoinette was false because he had
Speaker 1: found the quote in a book dated seventeen sixty. But
Speaker 1: that debunking didn't really take nor did the next, nor
Speaker 1: did the next. A good story spreads faster than a
Speaker 1: boring truth, especially when it's a story that fits our
Speaker 1: preconceived notions about who a person is. Let Them Eat
Speaker 1: Cake is perhaps one of the most effective propaganda campaigns
Speaker 1: in history, because even more than two hundred years later,
Speaker 1: it's still the most famous thing about a woman who
Speaker 1: never said it. Next up the classic rumor that Napoleon
Speaker 1: and Parra of France was short. It's a rumor so
Speaker 1: pervasive that there's even a complex named after it in
Speaker 1: which someone adopts a personality of overaggression or domineering behavior
Speaker 1: in order to compensate for being short. The rumor about
Speaker 1: Napoleon being unnaturally short is a rumor with a seemingly
Speaker 1: simple explanation. A according to the French measurement system at
Speaker 1: the time, Napoleon was five to objectively on the shorter
Speaker 1: side for a man, but the metric system hadn't yet
Speaker 1: normalized measurements across Europe, and the French inch at the
Speaker 1: time was two point seven centimeters while the Imperial inch
Speaker 1: is two point five four centimeters, which means that by
Speaker 1: modern metrics, Napoleon would have stood a little bit above
Speaker 1: five five, or just about average height for a man
Speaker 1: at the time. Another factor that contributed to the idea
Speaker 1: that Napoleon was short was that he would have surrounded
Speaker 1: himself with his most elite soldiers, who were incredibly tall,
Speaker 1: genetically blessed Frenchman. Anyone flanked by two eighteenth century Parisian
Speaker 1: shacks would look short by comparison, and the idea of
Speaker 1: Napoleon being short took root in British propaganda. The cartoonist
Speaker 1: James Gilray was incredibly influential, especially with his drawings of
Speaker 1: the quote maniac Ravings of Little Bony, in which Napoleon
Speaker 1: is depicted as a tantramming toddler in boots half the
Speaker 1: size of his body. Another famous Gilray drawing, titled The
Speaker 1: plum Putting of Danger, features Napoleon across a dinner table
Speaker 1: from the British Prime Minister William Pitt. While the pair
Speaker 1: of men divide up a dessert meant to depict the globe.
Speaker 1: Pitt is depicted as tall and lanky, with legs that
Speaker 1: are practically skeletal. Cartoons are all about contrast, and so Napoleon,
Speaker 1: practically hidden beneath the large hat, is tiny. Perhaps unsurprisingly,
Speaker 1: the cartoons infuriated Napoleon. He sent a barrage of letters
Speaker 1: across the Channel demanding that the British government censored depictions
Speaker 1: of him in their press. Surprise, surprise, the British government
Speaker 1: did not heed his request, and that left Napoleon between
Speaker 1: a rock and a hard place. Getting angrier about it
Speaker 1: would only make him look like the short, ill tempered
Speaker 1: toddler with something to compensate for. The next rumor is
Speaker 1: one that verges a little bit on the pornographic, so
Speaker 1: if you're listening with a younger listener, you might want
Speaker 1: to fast forward a little bit. This is the rumor
Speaker 1: about Catherine the Great. Maybe you've heard of it, that
Speaker 1: the female Empress of Russia died while having sex with
Speaker 1: a horse. Enemies of Catherine the Great long painted her
Speaker 1: as a sexual deviant. She did have a number of
Speaker 1: sexual relationships after her one ill fated marriage too, Zar
Speaker 1: Peter the Third, although not a number of relationships that
Speaker 1: would have raised eyebrows if she had been a male ruler.
Speaker 1: When Catherine was a teen major, a minor German princess
Speaker 1: who was still named Sophie at the time, she was
Speaker 1: married off to Peter the Third, who was to be
Speaker 1: brief terrible at being a czar. To make a long
Speaker 1: story extremely short, Catherine overthrew her husband with the help
Speaker 1: of her lover, Gregory or Love. From there. Catholick's romantic
Speaker 1: partners were usually also her political partners. She tended to
Speaker 1: be attracted to men like Gregory Patempkin with a military
Speaker 1: and political mind who could help her rule the incredibly
Speaker 1: vast Empire of Russia. It's a side effect of being
Speaker 1: a woman with power that terrible rumors start to spread eventually,
Speaker 1: and Catherine's personality encouraged certain rumors to some degree. There
Speaker 1: were the aforementioned partners. Even into her middle and older age,
Speaker 1: Catherine continued to take lovers, many of whom were men
Speaker 1: much younger than she was. And it's also believed that
Speaker 1: Catherine kept a small room adjacent to her suite where
Speaker 1: she kept pornographic materials and erotica, including furniture carved with
Speaker 1: explicit and X rated naked figures. During World War Two,
Speaker 1: German soldiers raiding the palace in supposedly found the secret
Speaker 1: rooms and took photos of the furniture, but since then
Speaker 1: the furniture was either lost in the chaos of war
Speaker 1: or purposefully removed by the Russian government to protect the
Speaker 1: royal family's virtue. But none of that quite explains the
Speaker 1: extremeness and specificity of the story that so many of
Speaker 1: us have heard about Catherine the Great, That she was
Speaker 1: engaging in beastiality with a horse suspended above her when
Speaker 1: the horses harness broke and crushed her to death. I
Speaker 1: hate killing a fun rumor as much as the next person,
Speaker 1: but it's not true. Catherine died of a stroke at
Speaker 1: age sixty seven in her bed not having sex with
Speaker 1: a horse. Insane as it sounds, though that horse rumor
Speaker 1: didn't quite come out of nowhere. At the time, the
Speaker 1: notion of quote riding a horse was a common euphemism
Speaker 1: for female sexuality, and Catherine, who frequently wore male bridges
Speaker 1: and military dress, was also a famed equestrian. An actual equestrian,
Speaker 1: she was incredibly adept at riding a horse, so that's
Speaker 1: basically the origin of the rumor that she was more
Speaker 1: sexually promiscuous than might have been expected of a woman
Speaker 1: in the eighteenth century, and that she was really good
Speaker 1: and really interested in riding horses. And rumors, especially colorful rumors,
Speaker 1: are hard to kill. Propaganda against the Empress was extremely
Speaker 1: common in her lifetime, both in Russia and abroad. When
Speaker 1: Catherine the Great, who was a frequent pen pal of Voltaire,
Speaker 1: didn't throw her support behind the French revolutionaries during their revolt,
Speaker 1: they showed their lack of appreciation with a series of
Speaker 1: particularly harsh caricatures, although you can't really blame any monarch
Speaker 1: for not supporting the group overthrowing and beheading monarchs. And
Speaker 1: then when it comes to legacy, it also didn't help
Speaker 1: Catherine the Great that the next to inherit the Russian throne,
Speaker 1: her son Paul the First, hated and resented her. But
Speaker 1: I suppose when it comes to legacy for Catherine the
Speaker 1: Great it's a mixed bag. We may half believe that
Speaker 1: she died in a outrageous act of sexual grotesquery, but
Speaker 1: then again we do still refer to her as the Great.
Speaker 1: There are some rumors that aren't really commonly discussed anymore,
Speaker 1: but which were at one time wildly popular conspiracy theories,
Speaker 1: namely that Elizabeth the First, England's long reigning female monarch,
Speaker 1: the Virgin Queen who ushered in an era of artistic
Speaker 1: and domestic prosperity, was actually a man. The popularizer of
Speaker 1: this myth was actually the author from Stoker, who you
Speaker 1: probably know for his book Dracula. Soaker also wrote a
Speaker 1: book published in nine called Famous Impostors, in which he
Speaker 1: claimed that Queen Elizabeth was actually replaced by a male
Speaker 1: doppelganger when she was a child, and that it was
Speaker 1: he the doppelganger who was actually ruling during the Great
Speaker 1: Elizabethan Age. Stoker had been traveling through the Cotswalds of
Speaker 1: England when he found himself in a small village where
Speaker 1: for their May Day celebration they had a small boy
Speaker 1: dress up as Elizabeth. When Stoker inquired as to the
Speaker 1: origins of the tradition, they told him this story that
Speaker 1: when Princess Elizabeth was young, sometime around fifteen forty three
Speaker 1: or forty four, she had been sent to that village
Speaker 1: of Bristly in the Cotswalts to avoid the threat of
Speaker 1: plague that was so deadly in the more densely populated city.
Speaker 1: But while Elizabeth was there on her countryside retreat, she died,
Speaker 1: whether of the plague or another unspecified illness. Princess Elizabeth's governess,
Speaker 1: knowing that Elizabeth's father, King Henry, was famous for his temper,
Speaker 1: decided that she would hide the Princess's death before King
Speaker 1: Henry came out to the countryside to visit his daughter.
Speaker 1: The governess had a small problem. There were no young
Speaker 1: girls in the village who at all resembled the pale
Speaker 1: red haired Elizabeth. But there was a young boy, a
Speaker 1: little playmate of the deceased Elizabeth, who had surprisingly delicate features,
Speaker 1: who was fair with light eyes and light hair. With
Speaker 1: time until the king's visit running short, the governess decided
Speaker 1: to dress the little boy up in Elizabeth's clothing and
Speaker 1: hoped for the best. King Henry, who was either in
Speaker 1: a hurry or not quite sure what his daughter looked like.
Speaker 1: After a few months, apart fully believed the Khan, and
Speaker 1: so from that time on, the young country boy became
Speaker 1: the Princess Elizabeth, and the real princess, who had died,
Speaker 1: was buried anonymously somewhere in a quiet Cotswald's grave. Supposedly
Speaker 1: three hundred years later, the Reallizabeth's body was dug up
Speaker 1: accidentally during some building work. The body was conveniently reburied
Speaker 1: without anyone doing an actual examination or knowing where it
Speaker 1: was buried, but the Cotswald's May Day tradition was born.
Speaker 1: There are a couple of factors that might tempt someone
Speaker 1: to suspect that maybe Elizabeth was a man, outside of
Speaker 1: just the basic sexism of not wanting to believe a
Speaker 1: woman could effectively rule a country. She famously wore thick
Speaker 1: powder makeup, although the real reason was that she wore
Speaker 1: it to cover up smallpox scars and not stubble, and
Speaker 1: Elizabeth famously never married or had children. Being a virgin
Speaker 1: queen married to England would be a convenient cover if
Speaker 1: she were actually a man who couldn't go to bed
Speaker 1: with some random foreign prints. But the most compelling evidence
Speaker 1: for some less than enlightened spirits was the power of
Speaker 1: her leadership. Her speeches were rousing, she had a temper,
Speaker 1: she was controlling, She was an incredible leader. In short,
Speaker 1: she was all of the traits stereotypically assigned to male monarchs.
Speaker 1: As I'm sure you can catch on, there is no
Speaker 1: truth to the rumors. Elizabeth was examined by a number
Speaker 1: of doctors throughout her life, and none of them mentioned
Speaker 1: that she had male anatomy at all. And also, at
Speaker 1: various points in her life there were nurses and ladies
Speaker 1: who were bribed by suitors or politicians to inform them
Speaker 1: as to whether Elizabeth was still having her monthly bleeding.
Speaker 1: I eat to let them know if she was still
Speaker 1: of child bearing years all of that is to say
Speaker 1: Elizabeth was absolutely a woman, and the idea of her
Speaker 1: secretly being replaced by a male doppelganger by a governess
Speaker 1: in a moment of panic is a fun story and
Speaker 1: a fun origin to a tradition of a village where
Speaker 1: they dress a young boy up in costume, but not
Speaker 1: much else. In the vein of impostors and conspiracy theories,
Speaker 1: here's a conspiracy theory that some people actually believe to
Speaker 1: this day that the son of Marie Antoinette and King
Speaker 1: Louis the sixteenth of France, Louis Charles, the Lost Aufhen,
Speaker 1: actually survived the French Revolution. The story of Louis Charles
Speaker 1: of France is tragic. He was a Prince of Versailles
Speaker 1: four years old when his older brother died, which made
Speaker 1: him the future Louis the seventeenth of France and heir
Speaker 1: to the French throne. But then when he was still
Speaker 1: a young boy, the French Revolution imprisoned his family. His
Speaker 1: father was beheaded and his mother was imprisoned, and the
Speaker 1: young Louis Charles was brutally tortured with an earshot of
Speaker 1: his mother. He was beaten and also made to drink
Speaker 1: wine until he stumbled to make the guards laugh. He
Speaker 1: was told that his parents were traitors and that his
Speaker 1: mom had sexually abused him. And then, of course, his mother,
Speaker 1: Marie Antoinette, who spent her days pressed against the wall
Speaker 1: of her jail cell hoping to catch a glimpse of
Speaker 1: her son as he was brought back and forth from
Speaker 1: his abusive lessons, was also beheaded. When Louis Charles was
Speaker 1: ten years old, he too died of tuberculosis or jail
Speaker 1: fever in jail in the Temple Prison. Obviously, his death,
Speaker 1: the death of the boy that royalists would have at
Speaker 1: the time believed was the then King of France, was
Speaker 1: of massive importance to the revolutionary government, and so a doctor,
Speaker 1: Doctor Pelletan, was brought in to do a full autopsy.
Speaker 1: The body of Louis Charles was thrown into a mass
Speaker 1: grave in the Saint Marguerite Cemetery, but Dr Pelletan was
Speaker 1: still secretly sympathetic to the royal family, especially after seeing
Speaker 1: all of the physical abuse that young Louis Charles had suffered,
Speaker 1: and so the doctor kept a small souvenir he kept
Speaker 1: the young Prince's heart snuck into his pocket in a
Speaker 1: handkerchief and then safe in a jar tucked into his
Speaker 1: desk drawer. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, more
Speaker 1: than a hundred people would come forward claiming to be
Speaker 1: the lost Prince who had disappeared in jail. After all,
Speaker 1: how did anybody know for sure that he was dead?
Speaker 1: And being the lost of fault was a valuable claim
Speaker 1: to make, Especially after the French Revolution settled and the
Speaker 1: possibility of a Bourbon restoration went from possible to then
Speaker 1: after Napoleon imminent, the idea of a Bourbon prince impostor
Speaker 1: became so ubiquitous that it was a cultural punchline. A
Speaker 1: hobo pretending to be the little boy Dolphin appears in
Speaker 1: Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. The real boom in False Dafense
Speaker 1: came when the child's uncle, the man who became known
Speaker 1: as Louis SEV, became king. After Napoleon's fall. There were
Speaker 1: so many impostors that fraudulently claiming to be the King
Speaker 1: of France was illegal. French authorities didn't really pay that
Speaker 1: much attention to enforcing that law, but there were a
Speaker 1: few really prominent cases with so much support behind them
Speaker 1: that the French authorities did ultimately take them to trial.
Speaker 1: One such man was known as Charles de Navar, a
Speaker 1: traveler from New Orleans with facial scars and missing teeth,
Speaker 1: who wrote letters to the king and the Dauphin's lone
Speaker 1: surviving sister. He signed those letters d'aufin with an F.
Speaker 1: The most famous impostor by far was a man who
Speaker 1: went by Carl Wilhelm Nundorff. Nandorff was from Prussia and
Speaker 1: he claimed to be a clockmaker, but he had been
Speaker 1: locked up in Germany for counterfeiting and he couldn't speak French. Nonetheless,
Speaker 1: he persuaded a former Versailles lady maid and private secretary
Speaker 1: that he actually was the lost Little Prince, although it's
Speaker 1: also possible, I think that they were in on the
Speaker 1: scheme and that he was angling for a payout, and
Speaker 1: the Versailles ladies and maids may have thought that they
Speaker 1: would be rewarded for their loyalty. Nandorff's case went to trial,
Speaker 1: he was guilty, and he was banished to England, where
Speaker 1: he was eventually arrested for trying to build an elaborate explosive.
Speaker 1: When he did eventually die in Holland in eighteen forty five.
Speaker 1: His gravestone identified him as Louis Charles. His descendants remained
Speaker 1: committed to the Khan the belief that he really was
Speaker 1: the last remaining descendant of the Bourbon monarchy, although in
Speaker 1: scientists ran a DNA test on the lock of Nandorff's
Speaker 1: hair to prove once and for all that he was
Speaker 1: an impostor DNA once again swooping in to ruin the fund.
Speaker 1: DNA would also give us the real answer of what
Speaker 1: happened to the show called Last Defense. That calcified heart
Speaker 1: that the doctor had taken from the autopsy as a
Speaker 1: souvenir would eventually end up in the royal crypt of
Speaker 1: Sindony alongside the mother and father. In two thousand, geneticists
Speaker 1: proved that the heart did in fact belong to the
Speaker 1: dead Louis Charles, the ten year old Prince of France
Speaker 1: who died in prison. To me, stories of the Last
Speaker 1: of Fen escaping are similar to rumors that the young
Speaker 1: Anastasia actually survived the murder of the Romanovs in Katerinburg.
Speaker 1: It's a fairy tale, a romantic, hopeful story, and so
Speaker 1: much easier to swallow than the tragedy of young, pointless
Speaker 1: political death. There's one more historical myth that I have
Speaker 1: that isn't quite related to nobility, but one that I
Speaker 1: can't help debunking, and so if you'll bear with me,
Speaker 1: I'm going to debunk it anyway. Do you know those
Speaker 1: medieval torture devices that you can imagine from cartoons, The
Speaker 1: iron maiden with spikes that would close and go through
Speaker 1: a person's whole body, the rack, the pair of anguish
Speaker 1: stretcher that was supposedly inserted and expanded into someone's bodily orifice,
Speaker 1: either a mouth or rear end as punishment for sexual deviancy. Well,
Speaker 1: all of them are basically made up. They were all
Speaker 1: basically invented in the eighteenth century to scandalize and entertain
Speaker 1: people in medieval torture museums, and they've more or less
Speaker 1: served the same purpose ever since. The idea of medieval
Speaker 1: torture devices just don't hold up to any real academic scrutiny.
Speaker 1: There was an examination of that so called pair of
Speaker 1: anguish that was on display in a torture museum, and
Speaker 1: the examination showed that it would have been far too
Speaker 1: weak to have opened in any bodily orifice, and that
Speaker 1: it also had a latch that would have prevented that expansion.
Speaker 1: The first actual mention of a pair of anguish comes
Speaker 1: not from the Middle Ages, but from the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: One historian suggested that it might have been a device
Speaker 1: to stretch gloves or sucks, and the iron maiden that
Speaker 1: upright coffin with spikes that someone's made to get into
Speaker 1: and then you know, the door closes and they're impaled. Well,
Speaker 1: that was a flat out phony invention. The first mention
Speaker 1: of it as a torture device in the Middle Ages
Speaker 1: came from a writer named Johann Philip sieben Keys. While
Speaker 1: he was writing a guide book to the city of Nuremberg.
Speaker 1: He described a criminal dying in an Egyptian mummy case
Speaker 1: lined with spikes in the year fifteen fifty, but he
Speaker 1: had no actual evidence of that ever happening. It was
Speaker 1: mostly just a creepy, gross story that he wrote as
Speaker 1: he wanted to drum up attention. There's no actual evidence
Speaker 1: that the so called iron maiden was ever used for
Speaker 1: torture in the Middle Ages, or that it ever existed
Speaker 1: before the eighteenth century, but iron maidens began to pop
Speaker 1: up at torture museums across Europe. Not actual historical relics,
Speaker 1: mind you, just things fabricated to demonstrate what they say
Speaker 1: medieval people did. There was even one on display at
Speaker 1: the World's Fair in Chicago, and you can imagine why
Speaker 1: people were so enthralled by it. We're enthralled by it still.
Speaker 1: It's incredibly grizzly. And then there's something like the rack,
Speaker 1: which would stretch people out to torture them into confession,
Speaker 1: which actually was a documented torture device, but far back
Speaker 1: in ancient times, centuries before the birth of Christ, nowhere
Speaker 1: near the Middle Ages. And yet the morbid popularity of
Speaker 1: medieval torture museums, particularly among Victorian audiences, lead to racks
Speaker 1: being displayed as devices from the Middle Ages. Again, none
Speaker 1: of those devices on display and museums were authentic or
Speaker 1: ever used to torture anyone. Any devices that appeared in
Speaker 1: so called torture museums were entirely fabricated for museum purposes.
Speaker 1: Torture did exist in the Middle Ages, but it was
Speaker 1: a little less cinematic and a lot less grotesque than
Speaker 1: people might want to believe. The most common form of
Speaker 1: medieval torture was being tied with ropes or restrained in
Speaker 1: a pillory, which is the device that you can imagine
Speaker 1: where someone's head and arms are held through a wooden board.
Speaker 1: The point of a pillory was to humiliate, not to name.
Speaker 1: If a woman was sent to the pillory, she traditionally
Speaker 1: would have been allowed to sit on the stool. But
Speaker 1: people in the Torrian ages like now love the drama
Speaker 1: of the morbid, of the shocking, of the macabre. I mean,
Speaker 1: I have a podcast called Noble Blood and it's run
Speaker 1: for fifty episodes, and it's not purely Happenstand that I
Speaker 1: tend to gravitate towards stories of death and mystery. On
Speaker 1: some level, maybe it's satisfying to believe that we're morally
Speaker 1: or ethically superior to our ancestors, That they were neanderthal
Speaker 1: like brutes, racist, sexist, bloodthirsty, and that we because we're
Speaker 1: able to gasp, but their stories aren't. I can tell
Speaker 1: you that, in my nearly two years of writing and
Speaker 1: researching this podcast, the thing that I've come to realize
Speaker 1: above all else, it's just how similar we are to
Speaker 1: people in the past, how normal they were, how funny
Speaker 1: they were, they made jokes, they fell in love, they
Speaker 1: got bored, they made mistakes. Rumors are fun and they
Speaker 1: spread for a reason. But there's nothing more compelling to
Speaker 1: me than digging down to find the truth in the
Speaker 1: real story. Here's to fifty episodes of Noble Blood and
Speaker 1: hopefully the next fifty to come. Thank you so so
Speaker 1: much for your support. I really wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: do any of this without you. Noble Blood is a
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from
Speaker 1: Aaron Minky. The show was written and hosted by Dana
Speaker 1: Schwartz and produced by Aaron Manky, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams,
Speaker 1: and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at
Speaker 1: Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the
Speaker 1: show over at Noble blood tails dot com. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from I Heart Radio is at the I heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows. M M