Forbidden History - Secrets of the Armored Dead

Episode Date: August 5, 2025

In this episode, we follow experts as they investigate the mass graves of those who died at the battle of Visby in 1361, revealing the bravery of the Gutes in their defence against the Danish king's army. Cast List: Tim Sutherland: Archaeologist, University of York Helen Goodchild: Archaeologist, University of York Sofia Hoas: Gotlands Museum, Visby Thomas Neijman: National Historical Museum, Stockholm Malin Holst: Osteoarcheologist, University of York Petter Akeson: Osteoarcheologist, National Historical Museum, Stockholm The Happiness Experiment: Start your journey to a happier, healthier you today – visit ⁠⁠this link⁠⁠ ⁠to begin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. July 27, 1361. On the Isle of Gotland, before the fortified walls of a great city, a militia awaits an invading enemy. They are all that lie between survival or destruction at the hands of a ruthless foe. Professional soldiers and hired mercenaries.

Who were these people? And what made them fight and die together? More than 650 years later, an international group of archaeologists is attempting to find out more. They'll investigate some of the finds from the largest mass grave of a medieval battle ever found.

If you win or lose a battle, it's a momentous occasion for either the victim or the losers. They'll try to shed light on the men who wore this armor and fought this battle. Well, that's the foot that's been cut off. That is incredible. How they made their last stand and paid the ultimate sacrifice. Houses have been put to the torch, grieving people stricken by the sword.

Like a dog he harries with a sword, and Gotland is conquered by the Dane. The Swedish Isle of Gotland in the Baltic Sea has been free of war for 200 years. Yet in the centuries before, its history was anything but bloodlust. In the Middle Ages, Gotland was the richest city in the Baltic. It was a hub for seafaring trade and commerce dating back to Viking times. There are more hordes of coins and treasure found here than anywhere else. The middle years of the 1300s were a golden age for Gotland, most of all for its glittering capital, Vizby. No wonder then that this rich island drew envious eyes from across the Baltic.

1361 proved a pivotal year for Vizby and the Gotlanders. As archaeologists we're really interested in these periods of transition, and there is nothing that displays one of these transitions. one of these transitions better than a battle or a conflict because usually there is an outcome that's very decisive and that period of transition is not large scale. It can be down to hours, minutes, days or whatever, but it's certainly not years. And if you find the masquerade of a people who were killed during that conflict, that's perfect because that is the moment when the transition took place. So you can find out what happened before, what happened afterwards, and this is the point where it took off. And this is just a catalyst. on this island. And because it's an island, it's a very small, insular sort of activity, but it has repercussions across the whole of the Baltic, basically. The events of 1361 in Gotland captivate medieval historians and archaeologists. The story comes to us from different sources.

Few Gotlanders were left alive to tell the tale. King Voldemar IV of Denmark invaded the island with a large army of day Danish and German mercenary troops. The Gotlanders, without a standing army, formed a militia to try and stop them. But they were pushed back to Visby. It was not an even contest. Yet the militia stood their ground. The Gotlanders were annihilated by the professional Danish and German soldiers.

The island was stripped of its riches and never again flourished as it had done in the past century. It was the end of the Golden Age. of the Golden Age. The story might have remained nearly forgotten in the history books, were it not for a chance discovery more than five and a half centuries later. In 1905, a large grave was discovered outside the old town of Visby. Traditionally, the site of the Gotlander's last stand, commemorated by a great stone cross. In the grave were hundreds of skeletons. In 1928, Three more pits were found with hundreds more. The Vizby mass graves were a worldwide sensation.

Among the most important finds ever made in medieval archaeology. The finds were extraordinary, with more than 1,100 complete skeletons. I think Vizby, you could quite easily say it's unique. It's an assemblage of human remains that were discovered in the early 20th century, of people that died during battle. It's mind-blowing really in terms of the evidence you can acquire from a grave such as that. I can't think of another example where people were buried in their armour. Finding the people that died in battle in masquerades with their arms and armour

is phenomenally rare. It's actually actually unique. When I first came across this assemblage and I first heard about the Battle of Visby, I thought that, obviously it's just another battlefield masquerade. and so when I first saw the information that was compiled in the early 20th century and there were plates of armour on the skeleton itself and you think this is unbelievable it's so unusual and the mind races to try to work out so many questions why were they buried like this what sort of armour was it how effective was it what were the people like but but as an assemblage it's so important

and it really makes your mind race and it builds up a picture of what presumably happened on that date. The events of 1361 caused a deep scar that took generations to heal. Even now, it casts a shadow down the centuries. This is why historians and researchers today, more than 80 years after the last excavations, are compelled to revisit the story. Tim Sutherland is traveling to Gotland

to add what he can to the ongoing research into the events of 1361. He's a specialist in medieval archaeology, particularly battlefield archaeology. The gravesite is a few hundred meters from the walls of Visby. The battlefield itself has long since been destroyed by modern development. But it's likely this area was chosen as a burial place, because there was a monastery here at the time of the battle, and it would have been close enough to drag or carry large numbers of dead. Tim plans to carry out a survey of the site where the mass graves were excavated to establish exactly where the pits were. They haven't been touched since they were backfilled

after the original excavations. The good thing about this area is it contains the monuments, not only the medieval monument of the stone cross, but we've got a modern monument of the wooden cross which stands in the center of the church. The graves are under the pavement, they're under the road, they're under the grass. And so the interesting thing is how much of any part of this can we see. Working with Tim is Dr. Helen Goodchild of the University of York. She's a specialist in remote sensing, including ground penetrating radar. The radar may be able to show the graves, although there's no way of knowing just how much

the site has been disturbed over the past 80 years. We can survey through the pavement and hopefully get evidence to the mass graves. Then we want to just move slowly across the grass, getting more data as we move towards the cross. Hopefully we'll see evidence of at least one or two of these graves. But that's the challenge here. Can we see any evidence of the archaeological remains that exist here from the Battle of Visby? Back in 1928, Swedish archaeologist Benk Toderman began his own survey by looking for the area

that had been excavated in 1905. He not only found it, but also three more mass graves. The dig had to expand to an unprecedented scale to recover all the material. Yet after almost a year, there was still one entire grave left unexcavated. The reason they stopped excavating is that they just had too many bodies.

They had three existing graves which were all full, some of which had chain mail, quaffs, gauntlets, shirts, and there were even some and plate armour in there as well. And so by the time they'd excavated one, two, three graves, they came across Grave Four and they thought, there's no need to excavate this.

And so luckily for us, they left it in place. What seemed as though it would be a straightforward survey hasn't been as easy as they thought. Under the field are the buried ruins of the old monastery. It started out quite traumatic in that there are big thorn bushes in the way. There are lots and lots of undulations in the ground. We thought it was a very flat, green piece of grass,

and it's covered in lumps, bumps, and also stone walls. So the radar was bouncing up all over them. So although it was very hard work, and we've only covered a relatively small area, the results seemed to be really good. The experience has left Tim with a strong respect for the archaeologists who surveyed this site more than 80 years ago. You can't help admire the people in the past because they had very basic equipment.

The other lights, tape measures, and the spade and the trowel, and yet they came up with so much quality data, and we should look back at these people with reverence and say, actually, they were very, very good at what they did. And we can learn a lot from them because they accumulated very good data, but at a very basic level. And we now, following their footsteps and say, can we improve on what they've done?

They plot the results and see if any of the archaeology can be seen. We can see what they found. So we can use this to interpret our data. So we've got where the graves were, where the railings were, where the cross still is, and all the water pipes and anything else they encountered. The empty pits left after Torderman excavated them show up clearly. And they've successfully verified Grave 4 completely unexcavated under the Pave 4. And then Grave 4, this is the one that was never fully excavated.

It still exists in its primary form about a meter below the surface. Tim sees something else they weren't expecting. So we've got this strange anomaly there, which we think may be something like a pit. The good news is nobody's excavated there. It doesn't look like modern interference. Could it be from 1361? Grave 4 alone might contain many more skeletons and armor. and armor, and now Tim and Helen's survey has found another possible grave to be investigated.

Future excavations will benefit from Tim and Helen's work. On July 22, 1361, Waldemar's invasion force landed some 15 miles to the south of Visby at Vastogon, where the bay forms a natural harbor. Then they headed north. The Gotland Militia fought at least one battle to try and head off the invaders. but they were beaten back. The militia fell back to the only fortified town on the island, Vizby. Yet the great gates were closed to them.

The Vizbians would not allow them inside the city wall. Despite their protests, they were left to take their chances and face the invaders, their backs to the wall. The scene was set for their brave but ill-fated last stand at Vizby. The Visby defenses were strong enough to hold out. Why did they not let the Gotlanders in? Gotten was in the middle of the Baltic, which made it very rich, because you can trade from the east to the west of the west to the east.

And the Gotlander people were good traders. Visby was one of the trading hotspots of the Baltic, with waterfront warehouses, whitewashed buildings, and a safe harbor. It was a stone town in medieval Manhattan with a high white buildings and you have lots of churches inside the Vispie and you have this ring wall. It must just be astonishing to come to to Vispy. These were prosperous times. People of many different nationalities came here, drawn by a city built for trading. This was very cosmopolitan and there was an international town with many different

people here, they were Germans, they were Russians, there were Englishmen and there were Gotlanders trading side by side in the town. So when the invasion came, why didn't they open up to the Gotlanders? We think that the Gotlander people wanted help from Wispy, but Vispi Town decided to negotiate instead. And maybe that's why they don't open the gates to let the Gotlander people in. Maybe they were afraid to get their army into their town. So then they let the peasants die just outside the wall. The Great Ring Wall was not just built for defense against overseas invaders.

There was tension between the Gotlandic farmers and the Visby officials who controlled trade on the island. The war was built to get the farmers to pay to get into the trading in Visby, because the people in Visby wanted to have their trading center for themselves and make them their own money. A city wall to force the indigenous farmers to pay to enter and sell their goods at market. Such was the schism that existed between the islanders and the Visbian merchants. Why did they choose to fight this day? They must have known that they should be killed, probably all of them. Just staying there with a wall behind you and a well-trained mercenary army,

army just coming towards you. That makes no sense that they still wanted to fight this army and they did. In late 1361, the Gotlanders received warning that invasion was imminent. They had to work fast. With no formal army, they had just weeks to raise the militia, to train, and to armor up. The Danish army inflicted a terrible defeat on the Gotlanders. Thanks to the excavations, there is physical evidence for what happened. Vizby is unique in archaeology because many of the Gotlanders went to the grave

still wearing the armor that they'd fought and died in. It's in Stockholm that most of the armor is stored. The most iconic items from the Vizby collection are the body armors. The kind of armor from this time in the Middle Ages is extremely rare. In this collection, there's a whole range of armors all worn in battle together, then buried at the same time. It's an unparalleled insight into how medieval soldiers faced battle. Some of the skeletons had the remains of male armor still on them, such as hoods or coifs. It's rare enough to find single male links from most medieval battle sites, so entire shirts and coifs are extremely unusual. One of the key mysteries surrounding the burials is why so much armor was left on the bodies and not

first stripped. Various explanations have been put forward, such as the hot weather at the time of the battle, the risk of disease, or just that there were too many bodies to bury and too few left alive to do the job. In the first mass grave they've been neatly buried side by side, but in the end they are just thrown into the pit with everything and you even find coins and knives and quite valuable items as well. So they have been in hurry for the last days. Mostly been a horrible experience to get all those bodies into the pits. Why on earth would you bury these people

with all that's very, very expensive equipment with them? And there are all sorts of potential answers. answers. One of the answers is that basically there was no time to strip, which is a bit vague. Down to the extreme possibility that you couldn't actually get the armour off of them. If it's the heat of the day, all the bodies have been left for a few days in an intense heat, and they all start bloating, you wouldn't be able to get the chain mail off them. It's as simple as that. And so you would probably have to start butchering the bodies to get the mail off them and the armour.

In which case are they prepared to do this? The good news about burying somebody in their armour in a place, that's marked by a large cross is that you can come back in five years, one year or whatever, and you can come and take them off skeletons rather than off fleshed bodies. And so that's the one thing that makes more sense is that they were going to come back for these bodies and they never did. Metal was an expensive commodity, but what if the armour was obsolete? Could that be why they left it and didn't come back?

An armour was very valuable. So we think that they put the armours in the masqueries because it was hot, you had to get rid of it quite fast, but also that the equipment was old. Some of the armor, the plate armours, are still modern at this time, but some of them are more Viking style. Then it's really old. Another reason might be that access to the burials may have been restricted by the conquerors. This also suggests that they weren't possibly weren't allowed to. They weren't allowed to strip the dead. And it was only the victors that were allowed access to all this.

Now if they had enough equipment and they didn't particularly want to bother themselves by stripping all the dead, they might not have allowed anybody else to do it. Remember, this is armour and there were weapons. And so it could be that they wanted to hide their armour anyway to stop the Gotlanders getting access to it. So what better way than burying it? And it's a way of getting rid of a potential problem in the future. The coat of plates and lameller armours were transitional systems.

By 1361, these were being superseded by more sophisticated full plate armor for most professional men at arms, like the Danish and German mercenaries that the Gotlanders were up against. As everybody thinks these things are amazingly archaic and all-fashioned, but they're leading towards what is going to be the solid breastplate. People who are having to wear body protection

need something that is flexible, something that you can run in, something that you can move in, but a rigid body protection is an advantage over male. Male is flexible, it's very good, it protects you against sword cuts, but it doesn't protect you from heavy percussive blows if you're hit with a heavy blunt instrument.

They know that male is good because it's very flexible, but they want plate. And they spend 150 years trying to evolve plate. This is a massive technological improvement when you can shape large plates. The Vizby collection is very important. It's almost the missing link

in the evolution of European medieval armor. The well-equipped Danish men-at-arms and professional German mercenaries of Waldemar's army probably took anything of value left over after the battle, especially items that were easily removed, like helmets, of which none has ever been found at Visby. But what of the remains of the Gotlanders themselves? What evidence still lies in their bones? Malin Holst is an osteo-archologist, a specialist in skeletal remains.

She's come to Stockholm to see for herself a selection of her. of some of the bones from Visby. She wants to find out more about the collection, how the bones were classified and conserved. I don't normally approach the medieval period as a touchy, feeling romantic thing. I just try to be scientific about it and try to see what's there and take what's there

as fact and then interpret from there. When I do analyze medieval skeletons, I do see the, their daily lives from their bones and also from the context they were found in. And in the medieval period you don't normally have grave goods, but you might see markers on their bones that suggest certain activities or fractures of certain bones or particular wear on the teeth that give a clue about their daily lives. Malin's osteological work has involved in-depth study of the only other mass grave

from a medieval battlefield at Taughton with around 100 skeletons. In the stores at Stockholm's historical museum, there are more than 10 times the number of skeletons recovered from Tauton. We visually analyze the skeleton, so we determine the age, the sex, the living height, and any diseases the person suffered from or any injuries they suffered from. It's usually not possible to tell the cause of death. Ostearchology works very much together with archaeology and it's very very important for us to work together and communicate with each other because if I just study a skeleton

it only tells me a limited amount of information but if I then put it into the archaeological context and see what the grave was like what the site was like what the general areas like that the individual came from then I understand much, much more about the individual. The excavations were very meticulous for the time to take care of all the skeletons because they had a great interest in the military history and all the cuts on the bones were very interesting to them. Right.

But we have another interest in the bones because we want to learn more about the people. Yeah. Petter Ackison has studied the skeletons for much of his professional life, probably more than anyone else. He's looked at the ways in which osteological techniques of analysis in the 1930s differed from current 21st century osteology. Due to the sheer amount of material, little work has been done on them since they were excavated, the best part of a century ago. Since then, methods and attitudes, not to mention technology, have changed. The skeletons have become mixed. So this is a box with crania and tibia.

and one femur. The bones were not kept together in their individual skeletons. Archaeological methods were different in tournament's time. The site was gridded and excavated strictly square by square. If there were bones from one skeleton, they marked them so they could see each skeleton. Today, the accepted method is to excavate each individual skeleton completely, one at a time, keeping all the bones together in common. together in context.

What isn't of use to contemporary means of analysis might still be useful in the future if the whole skeleton is stored together. In some cases you have all the thigh bones in boxes in one box and the other bones in other boxes. So our work was a bit tedious trying to figure out which pieces belong to which skeleton. The sheer number of skeletons

makes it very time-consuming to conserve them. to conserve them. Petter and other osteologists have spent many hours putting together the Visby skeletons. Some haven't been looked at since they were packed away for storage. Yet it gives a unique cross-section of the types of wounds sustained in a medieval battle. Almost every skeleton has some evidence of trauma.

Tortemann's analysis was the first step towards revealing more about the individuals in the mass graves. His work paved the way for modern osteology. The evidence is in the bones. To be able to give them something back, hopefully we'll probably never be able to give them their name back. But what you could say, right, this person was of a certain height, of a certain stature, of a certain robusticity. And they looked like they, you know, they did some honest, hard grafting. And they suffered in life like they had a broken limb or a broken finger.

And you can see all this on the skeletal remains. all these skeletons that now remain of these people, they need to tell their story, and I try to be their voice. To be able to see them through their eyes and say, right, fair enough, this is how they lived their life, until eventually one day they died, for whatever reason, whether it was young or old, whether it was alone,

or whether it was with family and friends, you could have died in a battle, and you would have been tossed into a mass grave with very large amounts of people and completely anonymously and that's where they stayed. To be able to see their life almost through their eyes I think it's very important because I've been told by soldiers serving today that one of their dreads is to die anonymously unknown and then be buried

with nobody knowing where they are, who they were and what it's all about how they died and so to a certain degree archaeologists can help an individual from a long time ago have some sort of saying you know in the future you know this is who I was this is what I did this is how I lived my life and potentially this is how I died it's always difficult to say in a battle situation where do the injuries hit the body you I mean it's in the turmoil of the battle you can get a blow from any part from any distance

and you don't really know they had no chance because the invaders were so much better at fighting and more experienced The most common wounds are from bladed weapons, most likely swords. As he worked his way through hundreds of skeletons, Petter found blade trauma on many of them. You often see just multiple cuts on each bone. Why do you think there were so many cut marks on a shin bone? Were they on a horse, maybe, or?

No, I think these were the Gotlandic peasants and the Danish army knew that Probably the people they were about to kill didn't have that much protection on their bones, on their legs. So they just aimed low and cut and cut and cut and cut. To disable them? Yeah, exactly. And we often see that five, six, seven cuts. And are they generally concentrated on the legs, all on the lower legs? Mostly on the lower legs, but there also are some wounds on the thigh bones.

But then we see that it's on the lower part of them. And there are many examples of feet being chopped off. And sometimes both feet with just one blow. That's incredible. So the Danish army must have had very good weapons. Oh yes. And the right technique. Yes.

It seems that it was a deliberate strategy to chop off, well, chop at the legs actually. More than a third of the shin, bones have cut marks on them and not only one cut on many of them, the Danish army have hit the Gotlantic farmers many times on the lower parts of their legs. Why were these injuries so frequent? Almost all the cuts are to the lower legs and they're so low down, so how would you deliver that sort of blow?

With a range of the sword, you can easily hit the lower part of the bone. Without bending down? Yeah. I was saying that sometimes both legs were cut as if in one blow. Is that possible with the sword? Yes, it possible. I think so. If you look at what kind of armor the presence of Gotland would have, it would probably protect the upper body and the head.

And if you're not trained, it's hard to protect the legs. The most important first thing is to get the opponent down on the ground. And then they could have been finished off with the... Yeah, exactly. Cut them in the legs. Get them down on the ground and then finish them off. Yeah. It's very effective to take the legs off because you won't fight more and you will scream more.

And if you hear your brother screaming next to you, you won't fight that good anymore. Many of the skulls have rhomboid or trauma marks. Some of these may have been caused by crossbow bolts, but most were probably due to Warhammers. The Danish army used these weapons with hideous efficiency, probably to finish off men already wounded by the swords. Sometimes when you pick up a crania with a big hole in it, you just put it down and had to go and take some coffee and take a break for a while. It disturbs you what people can do to each other.

Among the militia were the old, the sick, the young, buried in outdated armor that wasn't even worth salvaging from the corpses. Why were these people left to face the Danish army, with its trained knights and professional mercenaries? They had to go out and fight against this well-trained army, and they didn't know what to expect, but they were all just slaughtered. Despite the terrible suffering evidenced in the bones, there is also the truth that the Gotlanders fought and died in a brave,

yet hopeless last stand. Families, fathers, brothers and sons who died trying to protect their homes and loved ones. If you win or lose a battle, it's a momentous occasion for either the victors or the losers. And when this happens on a national scale, it means that massive changes take place across a whole country, maybe even a whole continent.

And so when you see evidence of a battle, you can pick out what was happening to each side and these people in the graves presumably most of them are the losers the fact that Gotlanders lost and the Danes won means that the now is a sea change across the whole of that island and the Gotlanders who were phenomenally wealthy people suddenly are ruled by somebody from an external country the physical remains in Stockholm and Visby serve as lasting monuments to the heroism and tragedy of 1361, the Gotlanders themselves, and the gray walls that denied them safety.

Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you. And for more from the Like a Shot Network, check out Where Did Everyone Go, Histories of the Abandoned, a deep dive into the incredible stories behind forgotten places. Available now on your favorite podcast platforms. Thanks for listening.