Gone Medieval - Lies that Misled Medieval People

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

Everyone lies from time to time but some lies have had a particular influence on world events and have even been a major factor in shaping history. In the Middle Ages, for example, how did an outlandish book called The Travels of Sir John Mandeville create misconceptions about foreigners? And how did falsehoods promoted after the death of a young boy in northern Italy lead to widespread anti-semitic pogroms as well as conspiracy theories that endure today? In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Cat Jarman is joined by Natasha Tidd, author of the new book A Short History of the World in 50 Lies. Together they explore these two cases where lies had widespread consequences. This episode was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg. Read more of Natasha Tidd’s work at F Yeah History. If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr Kat Jarman. Lying. We all lie from time to time, but some lies have had a particular influence on world events and have even been a major factor in shaping world history. From great leaders and empires of the past of the present day, lies have been used to manipulate, deceive and achieve. power. And this is precisely the topic of a brilliant new book entitled A Short History of

the World and 50 Lies, written by historian Natasha Tid. So in today's episode, I've invited Natasha Long to talk about some of those lies that were told back in the middle ages. And for a bit of a chat about how and why those lies and retellings are problematic, and even how some of them still inform or affect our views of the past and present today. So Natasha, I'm welcome to the Gone Medieval Studio today. Thank you so much for having me. And congratulations on the book. Now, I really, really enjoyed this.

It's got a really nice sweep through. You get lots of detail about all these different case studies going way back from early history, really, to the present day. So we are going to be focusing in on the Middle Ages today. But I did actually want to ask you, first of all. You call this a short history of the world in 50 lies, as opposed to myths or legends or anything like that. I wanted to ask you, first of all, what do we really mean by? lies in this context. Are there sort of deliberate and malicious things? Is that sort of different from this? Or how do you define them in this sort of work? I think when it comes to lies, it can be

such a personal thing. So nailing down exactly what lies are was actually a surprisingly difficult thing when it came to writing this book. At one point, I had a ridiculous spreadsheet, everything that could be considered a lie and what stories would fit into that. And it just got bit bonkers at one point. But for this, I saw things as things that are deliberate. They don't necessarily have to be malicious, although I will say a lot of the ones in the book are malicious. But so we have things like forgeries and scams and things like that. But then we also include propaganda as well as all out lies in general. So there's a real mismatch. But we looked at basically something that is very deliberate, something that is done deliberately to lie rather than a myth

that's spiraled out of control. So I guess the key is, that somebody knows that this isn't the truth, but they are deliberately presenting another version of it, I suppose. Exactly. I think it's that knowledge that this is definitely happening that you've made the decision to lie, rather than this might be something that you believe that might not necessarily be true. That really makes sense. And as we'll see,

a lot of these are things to do with gaining power or religion and beliefs and things like, there's a reason behind them, aren't there? There's an intent that you have with all of these lies. Exactly. Everything is very intentional. It just helps get rid of a little bit of the grey area, I think. And was it quite difficult when you sat down to write this? Did you find it difficult in actually getting to the reality of some of these stories? Does it still sort of clear what the lie was and what the reality was?

Or was that sometimes difficult as well? Yeah, I think it was a very difficult book to research on the whole, which I actually love. I love a challenge in general. But also, luckily, a lot of the work I do goes into the more, quote-unquote, untold areas of history, which aren't necessarily untold, they're just not covered a lot. And so a lot of these stories and a lot of these lies were kind of in the footnotes of things, rather than as an entire kind of book or chapter or anything in themselves. It was very much eking things out to get the information in the first place,

which I think has been really fun, and I hope the reader really enjoys as well, because it's a different look at some chapters in history that you think you might know, or some things that hopefully will be a bit surprising as well. Yeah, that's always really good. And I think what's important with book like this is, especially now with the internet, with anybody being able to put anything online that comes across as very authoritative. It's quite easy to come across things that are misleading and not quite the truth. And so to have something that goes into that in a bit more detail is great.

Yeah, I feel like I've never wanted to learn how to edit Wikipedia pages more than I have when I was researching this book. I can imagine, absolutely. So we are, as I said, going to be focusing on the middle ages. because of the topic of this podcast. But just to be a little bit curious, because you go a bit further back in time than that. What other sort of oldest lies that we know about, would you say?

Yes, I think, as you've said earlier, lies are just a part of being human, it's part of our nature. So there isn't necessarily an invention of lying that we can pinpoint, but there are a lot of cases from the ancient world. So in the book, the oldest one that we have is from the Akamid Empire and dates around 522 BC. And that revolves around. following the death of Campes' second and Darius' great rise to power,

which involved supposedly killing a usurper king to get a crown. This tale was actually inscribed in the Behistin inscription, but it's actually more likely that if anyone was a usurper, it was probably Darius, who took down Camps' brother, Bardia, who would have been the rightful heir to the crown, and spun this fail of a fake Bardia usurper who took the crown and how he vanquished them and rose to power. So that's our kind of earliest one. There were definitely ones that are earlier, but what we wanted to do with the book and what fit the kind of idea of lying, I suppose, this was the earliest one that I thought would really

fit. Excellent. Two of the ones we really wanted to focus on today, relate a little bit more to religion especially. The first of them that I really enjoyed. This is about a book called The Travels of Sir John, Manderville. Now, you have to explain to us what is this book, and who was Sir John? So the Travels of Sir John. So The Travels of Sir John Mandibil is a book that is published around the mid-1300s, and it's a supposed autobiographical globe-trotting journey of an English knight, and it shows readers a glimpse of far-flung lambs. You've got Asia and Africa, as well as parts of the world, that are unknown,

and this is where it gets interesting. These are fantastical lands where griffins fly and Cyclops is Rome, and people have hooves for friends. and heads for torsosos and all different sorts of things. So you can probably guess that a lot of the context in the book isn't true. And actually there wasn't even a John Mandibil, he wasn't a real person. So this could best be described in many ways as an anonymous hoax.

But is it presented as fact they're not actually telling the readers that this is made up? Yes, it's totally presented as this is a very real thing. If you were to go on the same adventure as John Mandible, this is exactly what you'd find. And in a way, it's very understandable. That's believable. So the first half of the book is very much going around Europe and then also en route to Jerusalem and the Holy Land. And obviously, these are places that people at the time were going to.

And so there's not actually so much kind of magical myth-making in that section of the book, mainly because whoever wrote this appears to have lifted most of their information from other pilgrim guides. Yeah, so there are bits of it that are clearly real and genuine that people would recognize from other accounts. as well, I suppose. Yes. When we think of the Chabels of John Manderville, today we think of this very almost silly book. It's very well known for its illustrations, which is one of those things where even if you don't know the title, you probably know the illustrations, which came with later publications in the 1400s. If you give it a quick Google right now, you'll see what I mean. It's these fantastic wood carvings of the most ludicrous things you've ever seen. And they've almost

become like memes, basically at this point now. And I think that's what we think of. But in actuality, the travels of John Mandible wasn't necessarily so light in its prose. The fact that so much of the beginning is basically factual means that so much of what kind of happens in the more middle and end part of the book is

more damaging and that is when John Mandible really discusses the idea of otherness. Yes, because he talks about people, doesn't it, and the people that you encounter when you travel and then it relates to religion as well, is that right? Yes, definitely. The earliest kind of thing where

John Mandibald discovers otherness really is when he's going around Europe. And it's then that he starts to meet people like Greek Orthodox. Basically, he says, I don't think they're right because they might be white, but they're not Christian like I am. So they're wrong. But with a little like crusading, perhaps they could get on board of me. And it's a similar thing with Muslims that he meets as well, where they have a belief in Christ and therefore, although they're inherently wrong, because it's not the same belief as his,

they could be okay if they got on board with his religious views. and then in comes a lot of very heavy anti-Semitic rhetoric. I think in the second half of the book, there is a final condemnation that he has of Jewish people, which is they shall go out in the time of the Antichrist and that they shall make great slaughter of Christian men. And so there is this real theme of demonisation of Jewish people throughout the book. And it's not just them,

it's also people from countries that, I think, whoever wrote the book assumes their readers will never have seen. So, for example, in Ethiopia, he writes that people aren't actually people there. Their bodies are made up of one really big foot that they just run around on and that children are born of yellow skin and it turns to black as they age. And it's ridiculous, but it's not necessarily ridiculous for the average medieval reader. So what we end up with is four types of people. So you have Manderville and his readers, who are the good Christian West. And then second, who have different religious views, but Christ is included in them.

and therefore they could get on board. Then there's Jewish people whose difference make them such a threat that they have no choice but to eliminate them. And then the four, presented as a monstrous margin, basically. And they're more sub-huberum and basically must live below others in that extent. Presenting this idea of how, as you go around the world,

you'll meet different people and they immediately fall into this category of otherness. So this is so interesting, isn't it, where that sort of halfway between fact and fiction comes in. So you have some of this is very, believable. So the descriptions of travelling around Europe or whatever, people will find that familiar, they will know that that's true. But then there'll be all these other lands, places they've never heard of, they know they'll never go. He's sort of playing, isn't he, with that

sort of place between fact and fiction. And he's making, presumably, some of these things more plausible and believable by having already presented lots of truths, I suppose. As we go forward in the period, and we see the impact of this idea of otherness. And, you know, it's people that don't fit in with certain viewpoints or a certain way of life, I think it really encapsulates that. And it is so believable. There is definitely evidence to show that it did make an impact in how some people viewed the world. Yeah.

And I think also the wider context of when this is being written. So if we're sort of in the mid-14th century, people are probably encountering more people from other places. You've got, you know, towns and cities really developing. So all of a sudden, this sort of idea of people who are different and different religions are more forcefully in the same place, I suppose. So you can see in that context why somebody might have an incentive to write a work like this, I guess. Exactly.

It's also really important to remember that in the 1200s, especially, 1,300s as well, anti-Semitism was absolutely rampant, which is something that we go into in a different chapter in the book, Simon of Trent. So this kind of viewpoint of very anti-Semitic rhetoric really isn't that surprising. You've brought up this topic of anti-Semitism especially, and that leads quite nicely to one of your next case studies, your next lies, which also involves the persecution of Jews. And it's one which has had, I think, even more of significant impact on the world and still has to date to an extent. And that's the case of Simon of Trent. So tell us about this story.

Yes. So Simon of Trem is essentially a story about blood libel. Blood libel is the accusation and belief of Jewish people killing usually Christian children for ritualistic and religious purposes. Now, just to preface this, obviously this is true and it's not something that happens. This belief is actually very surprisingly rampant still, especially within neo-Nazi, white supremacy groups and more conspiracy-driven corners of the internet. So the case of Simon of Trent happened in 1475 in the now Italian town of Trento, which was then called. Trent is really important to know a little bit about the history of blood libel before 1475 so it was very prevalent dating back as early as the 1100s realistically probably prior to then as well and so in England we see multiple allegations of

blood libel being made in cases such as William of Norwich in 144 Howard of Gloucester in 1168 and Robert of Burry in 1181 and so these accusations of ritualistic child murder come from a time in the 1100s, particularly in England, where there was a very, very rapidly growing sense of anti-Semitism, which was combined with already existing differences within theological views, as well as accusations of preferential treatment from the Crown. And so when you get this kind of fear-based conspiracy of children are dying

in the most horrible ways ever, it really fuels the fire, and it often ends in just violence. So we see this, again in England in 1189 and 1190, we get more. multiple acts of mass violence towards Jewish communities. Probably the one that's most well known would be the massacre at Clifford's Tower in York in 1190, which just wiped out the Jewish community in the area. And so what really is very prevalent in England in the 1100s, as we move forward, just starts to pop up all over Europe.

And so we get to a point in 1246 where Pope Innocent basically puts out a paper bill that says Christians cannot make claims of blood label anymore. They need to curtail it completely because it was just spiraling out of control. So that's where we are when we get to 1475 in Trent of you're not meant to be making blood label claims anymore, but everyone still knows what blood label is and it's very much still a popular belief that this is a thing that exists. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and on my podcast, not just the Tudors from history hit, I try to make sense of everything that baffled our early modern ancestors.

Like, what do you do with your waist? If you put your dung hill up against your neighbour's wall, you're going to cause rising damp. Would Henry the Eighth ever consider executing his wife? The Queen of England? Anne Boleyn? I'm not even sure if the Billins took it seriously, because why would they have any reason to suspect Henry the Eighth would really get rid of his queen? And why do men grow beards?

During puberty, the male body heats up and a smoke rises in the body pushes out the hair in the face. So the beard is actually a form of excrement. In other words, not just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Twice a week, every week. Listen and follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Who was Simon then? He was actually a little boy, wasn't he? Yes.

Simon was a toddler and he goes missing on Monday, Thursday, in Buda. So just right in the run up to Easter. And it just so happens in that year as well. It's also very conjoining when Passover is happening as well for the Jewish community in the area. The next day, which is Good Friday, Trent's Prince Bishop, Johannes Hindabak calls for a town-wide search for Simon. And immediately, he basically starts spreading the idea that blood libel is what's happened to Simon. They haven't even found the little boy and he's already going down that path. So he immediately starts raiding the houses of Jewish people in the area.

to look for Simon. I think it's very important to note here that Simon's father actually expressed a lot of concern that Simon had wandered off and fallen into the canal and that had been what happened to him. And he was unfortunately proven right when on Easter Sunday Simon's body was found in a part of the canal that ran underneath a Jewish family's home owned by one of the leaders of the local Jewish community a man named Samuel. And actually the house has already been raided on Friday and they hadn't found anything. But immediately Hindaback is like, right, this was definitely blood libel and very quickly the Jews in the area are all rounded up and arrested and immediately do not confess to murdering simon because there is very little evidence to no evidence that they did it's

just likely simon drowned which is incredibly tragic obviously hindabak cannot have this and so he begins interrogations under torture but before he actually gets any answers true or force from people because let's be real, torture is not the best way to get accurate information. He has one of his personal positions, a man called Giovanni Matthias, who goes and gives an address, which is very quickly turned into pamphlets, which state exactly how Simon died, which is incredibly grisly, involves a lot of torture and then ultimately murder. And Tabirrano basically says Simon was lord to Samuel's house, where he was murdered for his blood to be used during Passover.

and then ends the pamphlet saying that the story of Simon must be known in order to eliminate Jews from the Christian world. So you have a young boy who dies and you've already got this context. But actually what happens next is what becomes so impactful, isn't it? So what sort of stories are then told around the death of the boy? Just the fact that this statement goes out and starts to get made into pamphlets before any of the interrogations have actually really begun. it tells you at that very early stage exactly what you need to know and this becomes

incredibly widespread basically the pamphlets are going left and centre and then in june samuel and several other people are burned at the stake for the murder with the rest of trans jewish population still in prison and with this all spiraling out of control pope sixtus basically steps him finally can i just say very overdue at that point and he sends an investee to come investigating they come in September and Hinderbach on the surface he welcomes them and then immediately does everything in his plour to block their investigation as well as releasing illustrated pamphlets showing Simon's death for the first time in illustration and also spreading rumours that the investigator is being paid off by Jewish cabals. What the investigator does manage to find though

is essentially that Hinderback has forged a lot of the records to do with this case including trial documents to speed up guilty verdicts and executions, and also just mysteriously losing a lot of the records altogether. And there were also signs on Simon's body that his cause of death have been falsified. So yes, there's definite evidence of the lies that are being told from that side then, isn't there? Definitely. But for Hinderback side, this is making him a lot of money, because he has started to say, almost immediately, actually, after Simon dies, he starts to say, that miracles are being found to be performed by Simon's body

and he very quickly starts to campaign to make him a saint and people start to come on pilgrimage to see Simon's body where it's on display in the church. So there is a lot of money at stake for him so he really is doing everything he can to refute the idea that he in any way made up this story. So he's got religious benefits and he's got financial benefits to all of this

and presumably social and sort of semi-political benefits as well. So you can see there's a lot weighing in here, isn't that? Yes, and this is also something we'll find in a lot of blood label cases where if you pick even slightly at the surface of a lot of these things not only are the deaths of the children who it's been attributed to very likely accidental rather than anything malicious, but they're also coming out of areas

that kind of need the profit or need something to make the church have a bigger name in the area, some more people come to it. So it's something that happens both fueled by anti-Semitism, but also a lot of the time for greed and for power as well. It all folds in on itself. And definitely again, with the Simon of Trent case, this whole time as investigations going and it keeps on rolling on, Hindabak is attributing hundreds of miracles to Simon, and the whole time he's commissioning pamphlets and poems and artworks and everything he possibly can to get the word out about Simon of Trent. He actually starts a cult at one point around Simon of Trent,

which becomes really popular. And it's this utilisation of the media, which we really hadn't seen before, which means that Simon of Trent's story has outlived so many others and became so popular at the time as well. It sounds like something that could happen now, doesn't it, really? I'm interested in any sort of crime story.

If this sort of thing happened in 2023, you probably almost wouldn't be that surprised in some ways, I think. Unfortunately, it's still something that people do believe in, and you see it coming up a lot. And part of that reason is the utilisation of the media by Hindabakh. And as well as the Nuremberg Chronicle in 1493, which included an illustration of Simon's murder by very visually villainised and stereotyped Jewish people.

And is this image in particular that is really well known to know. If you give it a quick look, if you type in Simon of Trent, you'll likely see that image. It was plagiarised in multiple other works for centuries, and then it pops up again in 1934 in Germany. Yeah, so it's being actually utilised in Nazi Germany is in the lead up to the Second World War, which is one of these really interesting things

where you see some of these stories, if you can sort of justify something going back centuries and centuries and centuries and say, hey, well, look, this sort of thing has been happening for hundreds of years, we've got to stop it, or we've got to change it. You can see how that's quite an emotion. way of trying to get your point across, isn't it?

Yeah, so it's both the image from the Nuremberg Chronicle, as well as Tiburano's statement from 1475, that is used in the newspaper de Sturma as Nazi propaganda. And this was repeated again and again by the Nazis. We also see it come up in Poland, as well as in Italian fascist newspapers in the same period as well. It's an incredibly scary idea that this is historic, this must be real because, look, someone's put a date to this, and it really stuck with people.

And it still does. In 2019, there was a shooting at a synagogue just outside of San Diego, and the gunman left a note citing one of the reasons as Simon of Trent and revenge for victims like Simon of Trent. This is still very much believe. If you do go into the darker corners of the internet, you'll find that this is very prevalent still. That's quite terrifying. And actually, that leads me quite nicely to one of my more sort of general. things I wanted to ask you. So you've picked out 50 lies from world history. And I'm really

interesting in thinking about those that really had a lasting impact on us. And I think these definitely show a lasting impact at all. But do you think that most of the more recent ones you roast about, have they got or have they had more of an impact on people? Are we sort of more affected by recent things? Or are some of these older ones equally as important? It doesn't necessarily matter how old the lie is. It matters what. we do with it. So for example, Simon of Tren, that thrived because of the use of media and the illustrations. But I think the ones are more to do of conspiracy theory similar in that vein tend to live on. So a great example would be the testament of Peter the Great, which is also

included in the book. This has recently been cited by Putin. That alleges plans for Russian domination supposedly left by Peter the Great. This supposed testament actually didn't come and Peter the Great Atul. But in 1812, from a French historian called Charles Louis Lasser, who purported to uncovering it as part of a propaganda plot to give grounds for France's invasion of Russia. And then any time Russia is engaged in a big war, so we see it again in the Crimean War,

and it gets debunked, actually, in the 1870s. But people still believe it, because it's a great story, that Russia has this amazing plan to take over the world. And so we see it again in the Cold War, and we see it again now. There's actually a fantastic telegram. sent by Grenville Clark to President Truman, after he learned that Truman believed that Russia could never be reasoned with

because of the Testament of Peter the Great. But it really shows how we just stick with these things and we really believe them. I think it's often what is the best story and what plays into when we need it and why. That's such a good point. And I do think there's something very compelling to this, as we were saying earlier, this idea that people in the past thought the same. So, you know, it's something that's been around for a really long time. And so that must show there's some.

more universal truth to it. It's not just us now in our society or me or Putin or whoever. It's a bigger human thing, I suppose, which makes some of those lies really compelling. Definitely. And I think as well, when we're all at school, we're taught history isn't biased. When you look at history, don't be biased. But I think we forget a lot of the time that history is biased, just by its nature. And so a lot of the time, this is the only story that people are being presented with. So why wouldn't you believe that? It must be historic fact. It's when we don't look at every kind of side of coin. We don't look at the whole picture and we get into these kind of, it's about to say pickles, but often a lot more serious than a pickle. Yeah, absolutely. So I think that leads me also

a little bit to my final question for you today. So we talked a little bit about things on the internet. Obviously, that's where most of us get our information from these days. But I know that you've worked in museums as well, which is a really interesting way because that's sort of very much where we really present the past. But museums also very often have to present a story of the past, or a version of events or whatever. So it's very rare that we just have objects with no context, but very often they will tell a real story, which is, you know, understandably unfair enough.

And I was just thinking in terms of your experience in working in museum context as well and how these sort of, I suppose we could call them lies, but maybe sort of misleading can occur in museums, hopefully not in most of our museums today, but it does sort of come up. And how do, in your opinion, museums deal with all of that and this potential for sort of telling lies

or misleading or trying to be objective. How do you see that question? Yeah, it's a very prevalent argument at the moment, isn't it? You've got lots of different things either about museums are stealing history or they need to be more diverse and they need to be all these different things. I think it's really important to remember that like a book or a TV show or anything, you only have a certain amount of space in a museum and it's how you use that space. I think it's really great that a lot of museums are doing a big push to be more diverse

in how they tell their history, which is good for people coming in because everyone should be able to see their own history and really be able to connect with what you're seeing in a museum that's part of the job of a museum. But it also means that you're getting a much more rounded view of history. I think it's very easy a lot of the time to go, we're telling this story and really just think about the linear narrative

and kill your darlings, cut out anything that takes away from that. But when we do that, we lose so much context. And so I think, I hope, what we're going to find in the future is we'll see a lot more accidental lying in a mission just not happening because we are doing this kind of push for diversity and a push for just more well-rounded history in general. No, you can be a ligarion. It's such an important point. I think that awareness, isn't it, of what is a bit misleading or what might in the past have been

misleading as well. Sometimes we just inherit these old things that might have started as lies or myths or, you know, whether or not deliberate, but we might just inherit them and keep passing them on. So yeah, I guess being more aware and conscious of that is important, isn't it? Yeah. But that's also one of the joys about working in history, isn't it? And being a historian and doing this kind of work. Our jobs would be so boring if we were just, this was written in the Victorian period, so it must be true. We get to do our own research and we get to find our own evidence and re-look over things. I think that's part of the joy of working in history and just loving history in general, is we're always finding out new things and different takes on parts

the past that we thought maybe we knew and it turns out actually there's a lot missing from my information. Excellent. And I think that's a perfect place to finish this conversation and remind people that you get a lot of this in Natasha's book. So do pick up a copy of a short history of the world in 50 lies for some really intriguing, great insights into some of these stories and lies that have been told over their years that you might not know the true story of. So thank you. And can people follow you on social media or anything like that if they want to connect with you any further? Yes, you can. You can find me mainly over Twitter, either just by typing in my name Natasha Tid or FBA History. Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me. That's been a really,

really interesting conversation. So thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. So that brings us to the end of this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you're in need of an extra hit between podcasts, do sign up to our newsletter, Medieval Mondays. You can find out how to subscribe in the notes below. And please do rate rank and comment wherever you listen and follow us, including on Spotify, as it really helps more people find us. My co-host, Matt Lewis, will be here with the next episode. You've just listened to God Medieval from History Hit. Have a great week until we meet again.