Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 458: The Black Death Part III - The Horny Popes

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

This week, we continue our five-part series on the Black Death. In Part Three, we take a closer look at the Catholic Church's system of selling indulgences; we learn how one horny pope moved the papacy to Avignon; we examine the virulent antisemitism that engulfed so much of plague-stricken Europe; and we recount the tale of the curse of Grand Master de Molay.Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0

There's no place to escape to. This is the last time on the left That's when the cannibalism started What was that? Hey when comes down to it big ups to John McAfee see you in heaven We can't wait to see you and Jeffrey our other favorite Jeffries up there. Just enjoy themselves up in heaven playing Batchy ball. Isn't that nice if you know how they got up there. How indulgences everyone was actually In 2020 everyone was it released from all sin because of COVID by our fun our fun friendly pope Absolutely, but before we get started today. The only way I'm going is I need some

funky ass chunky flu This is chunky fluid. Well, there's two types of medieval food There's like atmospheric food and there's quacky flu. Is this quacky or atmospheric? What is it? What do you hear the quacks? I think it's quacky Welcome to the last podcast of the leftover one. I am Ben hanging out with Henry and Marcus Listening to some wacky quacky It's kind of fun man. Look at these guys. They got fun hats. I wish you could see here here kiss a look

I love these guys. They're dressed so cool man. That's man snooze. Oh my god It's funny to see people who've been married for 30 years, but are also virgins. Yeah, that's cool All right, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. We have a super exciting episode We're on to the black death part three. Is this a super exciting episode? Because when it comes down to it dog meat I was going through this outline and we did a lot of research today and it seems that there's a lot of Burning humans in this episode. There's quite a few burning humans There's a couple of grilled humans

Uh, there's a lot of bludgeoned humans. Uh, this is gonna get very very fucking violent We're gonna in this episode We're gonna get into the larger effects of the black plague on medieval society And just how badly people really lost their minds You could skewer a person and I think human meat would go well with a little red A little red pepper and then you know what maybe a little pineapple because of the ham texture Well, it was weird because I was just about to say that because we are so close to ham and pork We honestly probably would taste very good with some like very stew like stewed fruits

Like if you did a based like if you did a long like sort of braise of the human thigh Mixed with pineapple and apples and stuff that actually might be really nice. All right. Let's get into it Oh, and we're also gonna find out how those things that happen back in the black death are still highly relevant today. Whoo It's weird. It seems like humankind has not changed a second All right So when we last left the black death your sinea pestis had made its way to mainland europe through italy And was quickly spreading from city to city and country to country wiping out large chunks of the population

wherever it went This of course begs the question as to how the plague was medically treated Because while this was still the middle ages It wasn't the stone age and in the grand scheme of things the middle ages really wasn't that long ago Scientifically and even the people of the medieval ages Like if you read that book the time travelers guide to the 14th century it is you can really put yourself there humankind Really hasn't changed a lot and there has been some pushback on the idea that people during medieval times didn't bathe

Because there's a lot of scholars that are now saying that they did that obviously bathing was a part of some groups And I really think that's what's important to remember About medieval times like like now there there was Styles of living certain groups were cleaner than others certain people liked bathing Like if you look at france like just every one of these countries france italy We now know them as one big country at the time They were all little provinces and holdings and little mini countries in and of itself so they all had their own customs Like the south of france whatever it was was like the liberal side

And then the north of france was the super conservative side and they ended up really fucking up a lot of shit And they all bond over the smell. I was in williamsburg brooklyn for 15 years and i'll tell you one thing Some people don't pay there isn't that nice? That's cultural That's cultural Well in this period physicians were beginning to use scientific methods to treat and diagnose disease Although the methods were certainly hit and miss as far as effectiveness went Nevertheless the beginnings of scientific treatment in modern medicine Laid in medieval times in what was an early form of urinalysis

Okay, what's that? In a nutshell a healer back in medieval times would have their patient urinate into a bottle bucket cup or jar The healer would then observe and sniff the patient's urine which would lead to a diagnosis Oh my god, and a whole series of new fetishes I'm getting notes of pork. I'm getting notes of cigarette smoke. Are you my father? Oh my goodness. It's johnny apple bees And while this sounds stupid some early urologists were actually quite the piss sniffing experts In one old german story

It was claimed that the duke of bavaria tried passing off the urine of a pregnant servant girl as his own For whatever reason let him have his thing. Was it a drug test? What the hell was he doing? Was he trying to get a job at wendy's when i was 16? Perhaps it was a test to see just how good this man's piss sniffing skills really were But after just one sniff the urologist declared that the duke of bavaria would soon perform a miracle And give birth to a healthy baby boy within the week It's because I chose to be a father I chose to be a father in my own. My doctor is Danny DeVito. My friend. My short friend

Wow that Arnold Schwarzenegger impression much like you physically is just not like him Now these days we still use urine for many metrics of health Back then was no different urine that was milky on the surface Dark at the bottom and clear in the middle was to a medieval urologist a sign of dropsy Which we now call edema technically that's called the dark and stormy. Yeah, exactly. You can just see the urologist be like Oh, this is a good IPA However, should that milky urine turn ruddy? That dropsy had surely turned fatal. What does that mean milky to ruddy?

Yeah, what does ruddy mean in this circumstance red blood-colored, uh rusty, you know You know, I had some fun facts about urine. Yeah, do you know and this is true? If little farts come out of the tip of your penis You have up front Crohn's that's not a urine fact. That's a penis fact. Is that even a fact? This is me. I'm looking this is men's health It says here it says aerogas coming out there if you go It makes little farts and there are bubbles and farts coming under your dick when you're pissing You have Crohn's but I guess it moved to the front

And then also we really say a lot of it. Yeah, foamy urine is also not good foamy urine means you have soap God yeah, and red urine, you know, it's bad. Do we really have to ask the doctor if you're pissing pure red But no, but that was the thing is that this is in the context of edema if it goes from milky to ruddy Then he's gonna die But they apparently saw blood in the urine a lot Oh, because this remember this was still the middle ages and if a person had blood in the urine The urologist would deduce that the person simply had too much blood. Sure You're gonna want to piss out some of that blood

No, no, no, you don't piss out the blood you let out the blood But it was already coming out of the dick No, but you need to let it out of a different spot because there's too much and you got to let it out all at once And so therefore the bloodletting would begin and the blood would of course be poured into the streets later as a nice sup for the rats But even though your analysis seemed to be doing a little bit of good an Englishman named William the Englishman released a track What are you an Easter on a fucking NBC sitcom? All right, this is not about your grievances

He released a track in the 12th century called on unseen urans and that track changed the whole urine game Sweet dude. Yeah, it's like the black album In this tract William the Englishman wrote that while urine was still important to the diagnostic process A healer no longer needed to stick his nose in a dirty piss bucket to make medical conclusions. Yes. What are we barbarians? Oh my goodness, but what if I just really want to do it? I pull the piss in my ass And that's how I know what makes a man sick. This man needs an enema Oh, yeah, Dracula didn't loving it. Good work. Thank you Instead William the Englishman wrote a person could use

Astrology to discern a urine profile without even coming close to a jar of piss I think you should at least go close to the jar of piss if you're a piss doctor I don't think there's a way that you can avoid piss I do like this guy who was just like yuck. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. What if we talk about the stars? That's like being on a first date And so for hundreds of years after astrology was a large part of medieval medicine And it played a huge role in the way parts of europe reacted to the black death france especially See when the plague hit france king philip the third contacted the faculty of medicine at the university of paris

So they could explain the causes of the black death particularly because the university of paris medical school had the best astrology department in all of europe No one's ever called the astrology department of the sun valley institute of sandal wearing here in the wonderful san fernando valley of Los angeles when it came to covet you have to get a phone number first Yes, you do But the truth is is that while we all saying like that's ignorant while we're at home What we know is to them That was high tech science

Yeah, so france of all of the areas that we're going to talk about they were the most quote-unquote high tech Of all of the regions that got the plague So when you go to an astrologer to them, that's like going to steve jobs or some bullshit I don't know some from some guys some doctor guy absolutely nailed it steve jobs. It's not a doctor No, it's better fact. He fucking didn't do it. He ate leaves and then he died of pancreatic cancer He could have lived he was a billionaire. I know no the astrologers had all kinds of fun accoutrements They had the telescopes they had the the sextons They had all kinds of shit that they would use to look at the stars and to see where each planet was

And these professors men of science all told king philip that the plague came about because the three higher planets in the sign of Aquarius jupiter mars and saturn had come into a specific conjunction Conjunction and their honest to god scientific belief was that the conjunction of saturn and jupiter brought about the death of people And the depopulation of kingdoms and since jupiter was also in conjunction with mars That depopulation was brought on by pestilence pestilence i.e the black death Okay, pestilence is still the fucking most metal way of saying everybody got sick It does sound like a really cool dark flower too. Honestly. Yeah, listen to prequel the ghost album. It's all about the black plague

It's fucking damp. Oh, yeah Now these planetary alignments were believed to have created what they called miasmas Which were concentrations of fetid air and noxious vapors that entered through a human skin and disrupted their humors The only smell that's ever interrupted my humor is the dumps that kissle is taking here in the studio. Come on Wow, you're on fire today. Holy hell. I can't believe you went there. You go there. This is a real shooter's gallery This is insane roast mode As far as what humors were medieval doctors working off of what the greeks already established They believe that the universe was made of four basic elements fire water earth and air

Can you please say it properly like we've known from the 80s? fire Where's heart in there? They nobody gave a shit about with the monkey Building off that they deduced that since the universe was made of four elements Then the human body must also be made of four elements And these four elements were the humors In no particular order the humors were black bile

yellow bile blood And flim. Yeah, that's all I need. That's all the juices I need That's not nearly as cool as fire and water and everything else No, it's black bile black bile. Oh black bile and flim. That's fucking great And all four needed to stay in perfect balance if one wanted to live And while it is dumb, there's a certain logic to it that tried to explain common maladies both physical and mental Too much yellow bile your choleric meaning you're bad tempered and angry all the time

Too much flim your phlegmatic your coffin shit up. You're dying too much black bile It's your coffin shit up and you're dying. Is that supposed to just be like my attitude? Or is that a thing that's actually happening to me? It's something that's actually happening to you some are mental some are physical too much black bile That's what causes depression or melancholy as they called it back then. How do you get it out of you? Uh purging with the bile Oh, so you make yourself throw up. Yeah, you got to vomit certain things out. You could probably use certain methods Yeah, I wonder what they would do. Do they have a thing like apacac?

Apacac? Apacac? What's apacac? I have no fucking clue you're talking about. Apacac is a thing that you take. Are you naming a new dog? Apacac, come here. Apacac, off the woman. Get off that woman. Apacac. I believe is a thing that you take to make yourself throw up. Oh, uh, a purgative? Sure. Here we go. Apacac syrup. I'm looking at it. This is the first time I've ever heard that term. You've said it like eight times. I think with, you know, I think you do keep probably, I would imagine, I don't know for sure, but I would imagine with phlegmatic you do vomit that and with black, black bile sounds like something that comes out of your ass.

So I guess you shit until you're happy again. You throw the phlegm, you poo the bile. Honestly, sometimes that shit's the only thing that makes me happy. Absolutely. But it does seem like the most common imbalance was too much blood, which led to massive amounts of bloodletting. If you took Richard Chase and you brought him to the 1300s, he would become the head of the Surgeon School. That was a very scary truth. Furthermore, humoral theory also played into the qualities of all matter. Hot and cold, wet and dry,

because everything observable to the medieval scientist was either hot or cold and wet or dry. I mean, I'm either hot or cold and wet or dry. Depending on where I am, when I'm at the pool, honestly, I could be all four, depending on what I'm doing and how long I'm there. I believe that these guys sound like a bunch of apocox. Shooters gallery. Nothing but the best for you guys. Absolutely. Medically, blood was hot and wet. Black bile, on the other hand, that was cold and dry. Okay. Yellow bile, that's hot and dry. Flem, that's cold and wet. And I would say black bile is chaotic evil.

Yellow bile is chaotic neutral. Okay. Flem, that's lawful good. I'm gonna put that there. And then what was in farts? Blood is Blood is the DM. And then we all have blood and we need blood. Yes, Travis Morningstar described my touring as as chaotic evil. Yes, which I still don't fully understand. I'd say that. Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah. It was mean spirited though. Well, as far as how all this played into the Black Death, doctors believe that people were more likely to catch the plague by inhaling corrupt vapors emanating from diseased bodies in hot, humid air. That's hot and wet.

Okay, that actually kind of makes sense. Yeah. Ergo, one could protect themselves from the plague by keeping their air cold and dry or hot and dry. And in this, the doctors were accidentally correct in spite of themselves. See, Yersinia pestis does actually do best in a hot and humid environment because it's a bacteria. So when the weather is hot and humid, the Black Death does spread faster. We also know it lines up with the debargan marmot, their breeding season and the insurable breeding season. So it also works out at the same time. But we will say too, humans, while they, these all sounds ignorant and it's dumb, right? All of this doesn't make any sense.

But humans still had the same modern mind as we did. So they were constantly looking for patterns. So up until this point, this is their way of sort of sorting what they have just observed over now hundreds of years, like since the Romans and the Greeks, because they did kind of elementary medical science as well. And they've been tracking this. And the Arabs as well, also like the Middle East, they also were, they took a lot of stuff from the Middle East as well. There was a lot of people working on it. When we went to go kill all of them for 200 years, for a thousand years, from the year 1,000 to 1,300, for the fucking during the uh, during the Crusades?

Yeah, I was going to say the charades. Honestly, the charades and left that game charades. No, man. We said crusades. But we went over there and we went to go kill them all, but then we also learned a lot. That's right. That was that two-year-pictionary we had with them. But you know, they also, this logic also led to some really dumb shit places because they thought if the plague is spread in hot and wet environments, that it must be related to blood, which is hot and wet. Therefore, the plague can be treated by bloodletting, but that only killed the patient faster. It really did, man. I was watching um, the seminal movie about the Black Plague, uh, Season of the Witch with Nicholas Cage and Ron Cormage.

And I say Nicholas Cage. Yes, show respect, please. Because he is only about 30 pounds overweight in that film and you can definitely, he barely fits in his armor, but it's nice to see him swinging the sword. I like him getting work. I like him out there. Um, that's one of the only movies that I've actually, uh, fallen asleep watching in the theater sober. Season of the Witch is one of those movies where it is so bad, it's great, but it's also super boring, but also really fun. It's, you know what, it's great about that movie. It's the first 15 minutes and the last 15 minutes in the middle of it, not good. You see people getting the paycheck.

Yes, yes, you do, but it's, I believe it's Christopher Lee's final performance. Oh, is that a brand new- He's dying of the plague in that movie and he does a great job because they put big crazy boobos all over him and shit. But you do see it cuts to Nicholas Cage because for some reason Nicholas Cage and Ron Perlman are both acting as if it's 2017 and they're not associated with the time period. They're within the plague. They are men apart. But they look at the bloodletting because they look over and they see the trays of all the blood because they would just do it onto plates, right? Essentially, like it's not in the bags and shit. It's just blood everywhere. And you see Nicholas Cage go, these ignorant doctors, they don't know how to fix these men.

I mean, like you are not, I didn't, I don't even think that you did the stunt of taking the step into the room. I want to say that there was a full stunt double that went in and just holds the sword for you and then you step in and go, yeah, that's it. Whoa, that's all he's gonna do. The movie was so bad that not even seeing it with like our resident medieval expert, I went saw with Jared Logan and even he couldn't make it fun. He is a medieval expert. He is. Now these medical deductions, both good and bad, were mostly the work of men who call themselves

the new gayliness, who are all pretty much working out of Paris during the plague. These men were building off existing work done by Greek and Arab physicians a thousand years earlier. But by expanding on those ideas, these men were laying the foundations for modern medical practice. This is where it all begins. When they were sexually assaulting their patients. Honestly, are you talking about people getting their dick suck where they're at the dentist? The funnest way to get your dick sucked. I just watched, I just watched Hand That Rocks The Cradle.

Oh, okay, that would be helpful to know beforehand. That was a weird wild accusation against medical professionals. Obviously, it's because I just watched Hand That Rocks The Cradle. Why are you watching it? I don't know, it was just on TV. It's not in preparation for their show. It's got nothing to do with the show. No, it was in preparation for motherhood.

Oh, congrats. Thank you. My piss just I'm pregnant. On the dumber side, though, a physician mostly relied on astrology and numerology. Concerning astrology, a treatment would be prescribed based on when the patient got sick because the alignment of the stars and the planets would tell the doctor which organ was causing the trouble. I appreciate what you're doing there, sir, but if you could just look at the guts. The guts are the problem. See, you're looking into a telescope, sir, if you could just...

It's here, the problem is here. Didn't have that on my 1333 bingo card. I hate it, I hate it. Astrology also determined where a physician would and wouldn't open a vein for a good old-fashioned bloodlet. Look at where the veins are, doctor. Just look at where the veins are, don't look at the sky. Keep the blood inside of your body, you have just enough, I promise. If the moon was in Leo, the physician avoided the back.

If it was in Aries, he stayed away from the veins in the head. Oh yeah, because of the horns. And woe be to the physician who sliced the testicles or anus when the moon was in Scorpio. Woe be to him. Can I say that even if the moon is not in Scorpio? I guess that's what happened when I went to the doctor and they checked my balls for four or five minutes. I haven't had them check my balls in years. Well, that's when she commented that they were a little small.

They did say they were smaller and I was just like, okay. The other two attendants that she brought in there, they were laughing and clapping. But I should have looked at the calendar because maybe it had to do with the date and the time that I was in there. Maybe it did. As far as numerology went, one physician suggested taking the name of the patient, the name of the messenger sent to summon you, and the name of the day that the messenger first showed up at your door. Then you assigned a numerical value to each letter in all of those words and added them up. If the number be odd, the patient will live.

If the number be even, then all hope is lost. Any procedure done is no more than a formality. I don't understand. I feel fine. I feel fine when you mean it. What is even and odd numbers? What is numbers? You kicked it. What is that? They book. Is that the type of bet? We're not even listening, buddy. You're uneven. I just... You might as well be dead.

When did my insurance cover this? No, but thanks for paying every fucking month. No! But while astrology and numerology influenced the diagnoses concerning when and how people got sick, ultimately it was believed that the root cause for all illnesses and maladies, especially the Black Death, was divine judgment. Yep. Medieval logic said that since God makes all things happen, then afflictions must also come from God.

And since it is believed that the New Testament God is a loving God, then massive ill health and suffering must have come because everyone had done something wrong. And of course, when Marcus says medieval logic, he also refers to 1985 Reagan administration logic, aka, how the Christians handled AIDS. Nothing has changed in any way, shape, or form, because nowadays what they say, right, is that, yes, it's a punishment from God, but it gives us, kissle, Marcus, it gives us such a wonderful opportunity For what?

To know God's grace in letting these people die and be punished by God in your sake, and then we have to sit and watch and have the grace to, again, to watch them die. Oh, wonderful loving Lord, thank you. And if one does indeed believe that the Black Death was a result of divine judgment, then they might also believe that it was the curse that one man of God placed upon France that brought the Black Death to their shores. Hey, Louis. This guy, though, if there was a person that could curse all of France,

I believe it's this guy. This is one of my favorite stories in history, and maybe one day we'll cover it in full detail. Oh, I'm so excited for all of you. You guys are such fun little history nerds, this is nice. I'm cool. You are cool. I took a skateboard here, it was hard on the highway. Did you?

Everybody was honking. Sure they were. Because I had to walk with it, honestly, I'm not good, I'm not good at balancing. For this curse, let's go more than 30 years before the Black Death's arrival to March 18, 1314, when the Grand Master of the Knights Templar Jacques de Molay was publicly executed in France. Ooh. Now this was long after the Christian Crusades that had made the Knights Templar, and it was well into the time period in which the Knights Templar had gone from being God's chosen warriors

to a bloated, corrupt organization with power that rivaled the papacy. And that's the key, their money and their power rivaled the papacy. So the papacy doesn't like competitors. No. Neither do the kings and stuff like that, because the kings were having problems with the papacy, because this was involving the entire breakdown about whether or not does the pope control every priest in whatever country that they are in, or does the king control every pope and every priest that's in every country that they are within. So I'm just going to take this remote control out, hit fast forward, and then can you finish up, please?

With the 15-hour history of the Catholic Church? It's interesting, we should do an entire series on the Catholic Church. I agree with that. Well, it is interesting because these exact problems, these exact things that they claimed way back when in 1314 was the exact same shit that people were claiming about John F. Kennedy in 1960, you know, when he was running for president. Will the pope control the president, or will the president go for the interests of America? Damn, while the pope's too busy getting his dick sucked by a fucking child or something like that. Oh, right.

Very good. You actually made it two minutes talking about Catholics before you made a pope getting his dick sucked by a child joke. That was pretty good. Nice. You're immature. I am mature. I am mature. But also, the Knights Templar were like the cops over in their newly acquired land in the Middle East.

So the Knights Templar also, during this time period, had built up all of these treasures and various sacred objects that the papacy really wanted for themselves. And they also had a lot of money, which the king actually really kind of wanted for himself as well. Right. But even though the Knights Templar were indeed corrupt, this was also the era of naughty popes. Naughty little pope. And the papacy was just as, if not more corrupt, than the Knights Templar. And at this time, the Catholics were led by Pope Clement V. I do.

Pope Clement does sound like he can play a saxophone. He does sound like a pretty cool ass pope though. Now throughout most of the 14th century, the papacy was actually based in France instead of Rome. Because Pope Clement V was so horny that he moved the entire papacy to Avignon so he wouldn't have to be away from his mistress. She knew how to do what he liked. I guess. He wouldn't figure out how to replicate it. And he was like, hey, hey, hey, listen, why don't we just move the whole operation to my house?

All right. But when Pope Clement V was chastised for being too horny, he would do one of two things. The first thing he would do would be to plead ex-concilio medicorum, which was a claim that his horniness was actually medically prescribed by his physician. Otherwise known as the David Dukovny defense. Hey, man, the dude is just horned up. Look at it. Aliens get you all riled. He's got to release it.

I know. And if that excuse didn't fly, Pope Clement would then pull out a list that he carried with him everywhere of other horny popes. Then he would ask the accuser, oh, don't you find it interesting that the greatest leaders of the church also happened to be the horniest? Yeah, dude. Horny pop. I didn't have that in my 13, 14 big gold card. You can't say it every year. You can't do it for every year.

This is my favorite. Honestly, if I were to like the Catholic Church in any way, shape, or form, this is my favorite error. You would like the Catholic Church. Actually, you wanted to be a priest. The only reason you're like one of those people who hates comedians now because they failed at it. You just wanted to be Catholic so bad. It makes a satanist. But also, the Catholic Church at this point was the most transparent it's ever been.

This is really when it's just about fucking and money. And they were essentially the cross between a giant corporation. Nowadays, it's more about money, but it's not about fucking. Now they have to push everybody down because all the priests could actually fuck. We all just fucked back in the day. Interesting. It is a combination of a giant corporation and the mob. May I ask, and perhaps it's far too in depth of a question, and I don't want to derail us,

so priests could have sex and popes could have sex in this era? It wasn't allowed. Yeah, it wasn't allowed, but they did it anyway. Everybody just fucked. Yeah. There was another like the bourgeois popes were very sexy. Okay. All right.

I love a man in uniform. But as it was during this period of Catholic history, Clement V was a big fan of the indulgence. The indulgence was supposed to be a method for reducing the amount of punishment one has to undergo to be forgiven for one sins. Usually an indulgence would be given through prayer. But by the time Pope Clement came to power, that method had increasingly become a payoff to the Catholic Church.

You could be forgiven for your sins by giving him 50 bucks. Yeah, dude. 25 gold Florence and they had a sliding scale for the dependent how much money that you were worth. You could pay a certain amount and then it got to a point you could be for anything. And then the indulgence is a coupon for soul hours in the future. So no matter what you did, you could be absolved of sins in your life, right? So during the time period, priests could go, they could forgive you of your sins. But no matter what, you still had to serve the same amount of time that you would have done

in hell in purgatory in order to get into heaven. What these soul coupons do is allow you to take that time off from purgatory so you can get closer to heaven. Oh, that's nice. It's dumb. Yeah. But it's my favorite because it's just like, at least we're being honest about this. Yeah.

But this was the indulgence is that's one of the main things that led Martin Luther to go nail up his list of grievances which essentially created Protestantism. The big fucking deal in world history. This is, we just got, I'm sorry, we waited into the high school history swamp. Like we're in here now. We will work our way out if it doesn't work. Well, for Pope Clement, there was no specific sin that an indulgence couldn't fix for the right price. You could make an illegitimate child legitimate.

You could pay to buy stolen goods. You could just buy the goods. Yeah. You could pay for the right to trade with an infidel. And you could even pay to marry your first cousin if you so chose. Oh, this is awesome. This is cool, man. The Church is cool.

It'd be kind of cool if every single one of those like stepsister porns began with you giving money to a priest, him handing you a certificate with you and like, thank you. Very nice. That's great. Clement gave dispensations to nuns who wanted maids. He gave them to converted Jews who wanted to visit unconverted parents. And most strangely, he gave them to people who wanted to be buried in two different places, which required song the dead body in half.

So your top half loves France, but your bottom half loves Venice. You could do that. Put my dick in Germany. That is, it seems like there were so many things to focus on. There really was. They focused so much on the afterlife. I don't know. They sort of did.

Because it was a general part of their life because much more so than now, right? We like to distance ourselves from death very often. We have very elaborate end of life rituals, all of the type of shit you're supposed to do. You spent a lot of time with the dead. Yeah. And yeah, I guess you just wanted your feet in fucking London. You could just chop them off, but because you weren't allowed to mess with the body. That's the whole thing is that there was no such thing as there was no such thing as

autopsies or any of that shit because it was against any Christian rules. When I die, I'm going to get tattoos of both of your faces on my butt cheeks. You'll be buried with your faces on my butt. It's going to be a long funeral. It's a very, very long funeral. Yeah, I mean, that was part of why the Black Death was so traumatizing to people because they were so used to all of this pomp and circumstance when you died. And you also have to remember that the bridge from the real world into the so-called afterlife

was pretty short because all these people believed that God was such an insanely real presence in their lives every single day, everything that God had his hand in absolutely everything. So yeah, they were very concerned with the afterlife. So people literally just felt like the children of Joseph Fritzel where they were just getting constantly beaten down and they were just like, Yeah, I still have daddy. At some point, don't you just be like, fuck you, God?

Fuck you, dude. Like, Carmen, fuck you. I'm going home. Technically, that's going to be next episode. We're going to talk about a lot of that with the rise of the flagellants. That's what happened is that this created a massive, the Black Death created a massive hole in the respect for the church that people had and it created a lot of individual worship. I believe it.

Well, since Pope Clement V was already pretty goddamn shady, it was he who acted as a surrogate for King Philip I when the king decided to get rid of the knight's Templar. Clement himself ordered the execution of the Templars for, among other things, drinking the powdered remains of illegitimate children in their rituals. What is he? Alex Jones? Seriously, dude. It's the same shit.

We're about to get it. Dude, we're going to get real hard into how much of the same shit all of this is. And conveniently for the king, it was also Clement who ordered the massive Templar treasury be transferred over to King Philip. Money, baby, money. And also the knight's Templar became sort of a, one day we'll do a series of what we were calling B Team Illuminatis, like the idea of the people that would grow to the idea of creating their own Illuminati.

This is the beginning of that. Knight's Templar, they kind of became that because they were business owners. They started to really run their own shit outside of the church. They, people were looking to them as authorities versus other people and they decided to just cut them out of the deal. All right. By also making them a bunch of witchcraft, by also painting them as people that were heretics and witches, which is also very often done.

Interesting. So once Grandmaster Jacques de Molay was arrested along with all the other Templars, he soon admitted to sodomy, idol worship, and spitting on the cross. I do admit to being Ozzy Osbourne, yes. But this was only after he was put to the question, which was the medieval euphemism for torture. Advanced interrogation techniques. It gets the same shit.

Damn. Put to the question. That is horrifying. So what kind of techniques would they use back then? Well, one of de Molay's lieutenants testified that his torture involved hanging heavy weights from his genitals while he himself hung from a rope. Oh my gosh. What they would actually do is they would hang these guys from ropes.

They would put it along like they would throw the rope over like a ceiling beam and they would pull them up and the weights would be attached to the genitals. Then they would let them go and they would drop down and then right before they hit the floor, they would yank the rope back up. So they would be pulled upwards while the weights pulled their genitals downwards. Oh my God. At least you can save money on sails because you can just use your balls to the wind can blow.

It's the exact same thing where you're like, I'm Big Bird, yep, it's me, I'm Big Bird. I've got the budget to keep on the moon like you'll say whatever it takes to stop it. Of course, the rack, that was a big thing during these days. I don't know if most people know what the rack actually does. It looks like they're just getting stretched, but what it actually does is that it slowly dislocates your ankles and your wrists from their sockets. How many clicks from the rack though until it starts to get painful? Because I feel like the first two would be like, ooh, that's a yes.

Oh nice. I haven't loosened up like that in a while. Another Templar had his feet smeared with fat and placed in an open flame and when he tried walking days later, the bones in his feet dropped out of his body. Yeah. I haven't eaten yet, but that might be, I'm going to be like, I'm a little bit of that. I made a good pulled pork. And of course, there was also the standard tooth and fingernail removal.

That's done one by one by one by one. I think that it still seems like the worst to me. It's very bad. I think maybe the ball stuff is bad, they're all bad. But even though King Philip had promised life sentences in exchange for these confessions, he still wanted to claim a public and symbolic victory over the Templars. So going back on his word, King Philip executed the Grand Master. Which is interesting because the Grand Master was like this kind of mystical guy too.

They kind of thought he was as untouchable and as truly a magical figure. So when they had him, there was a big win for the Catholic Church to burn him alive. But he was also very formidable even from death. The resulting public execution saw Grand Master de Molay burned at the stake for his crimes. And as the flames engulfed him, he called down a curse from God on the King of France and all his descendants unto the 13th generation. Whoa, and that's when Salt Bay came and sprinkled a little bit of salt on him. Salt Bay is two years old.

No, he had salt on him on Instagram just the other day. He's still at it. He has gold stakes. It's not good. I know. This some believed was the curse that eventually brought the Black Death to France. And from the perspective of the French population, this curse rang true. Because remember this is like 30 years before the Black Death came.

A month after de Molay's execution, the horny pope who ordered the execution suddenly died. The King who orchestrated the destruction of the Knights Templar died a year later and the Great Famine hit the year after that. Sometimes the universe has whimsical timing. Then 18 months after King Philip died, his successor Louis X died as well and his successor Philip V had to deal with a peasant uprising that was led by shepherds who were pissed off that the Crusades had stopped. They wanted to kill more Muslims.

It was 220 years of killing Muslims. We did it. We did a lot of it. And then King Philip's line just fucking ended. They'd been in charge of France since 937 AD. What do you mean? They all died. They all just, everyone died and they couldn't come clean.

He had no more heirs. No more heirs. All the heirs died. They all died. And then it's kind of crazy to think that's type of institutional family because that's really what it was. It was one family line that ran a country for 400 years. There's certain things that are kind of, obviously that's the thing about this type

of history is that the time links of certain things are kind of unimaginable because we still view everything in chunks of like four years, our cute little presidential elections and all that kind of shit where like, this was one family that ruled a country for long longer than America has existed and it's already a thousand years ago. Yeah. They are pretty cute elections, huh? They are cute. Then in 1337, just before the Black Death hit France, King Edward of England invaded

and kicked off the Hundred Years War, which is the bloodiest conflict of the Middle Ages. This war, whose first of three phases that spanned 116 years, that first phase had started a decade before the Black Death hit. So when the Black Death hit, they were already in the middle of a horrific war and the war just made the plague that much worse. And all this perhaps lends a little credence to the curse of Grandmaster de Molay. Yes. Yes.

From the grave. Right from North Pole. Now like in Italy, the Black Death arrived to France by sea, landing in Marseille in November of 1347 after this plague ship was expelled from Genoa, because Genoa already knew how much damage just one infected ship could cause. Marseille, on the other hand, had no idea. You do make the Black Death sound like Fifel, where it's just like, ha ha ha ha ha ha. It really, in my mind, I do see a gerbil with a grim reverse like outfit on and the sky

that's going like, hi, I am, I love you. You be careful with this gerbil slander, buddy. You be very careful. Hey, man, if I see a gerbil, I'm stomping on it. Do not stop it. By accounts at the time, it was said that the Black Death killed four out of every five people in Marseille, although we now know it was probably closer to one in two. And that took Marseille's population from 50,000 to 25,000.

But unlike many cities in Europe, Marseille responded to the plague in an almost egalitarian manner. Cities and friends attended to the sick and dying, nobody was abandoned. People attempted to go about their day with precautions, even though those precautions was like a smelling apple. And local. I got my smelling apple. No more.

I got my smelling apple. No admission unless smelling apple is there. When I am against this smelling apple passport, what is going on in this country? Some local governments held strong in the face of mass death. Other cities in France, however, were not quite so reasonable, and none behaved quite as badly as the vagus of medieval Europe, Avignon. Yeah, the Windy City, baby. Very nice.

Avignon was a very Windy City as well. You know, it's not called the Windy City because of the wind, it's because of the corruption. Then why is the fucking wind so horrible? Yeah. What the fuck's wrong with you, Chicago? I haven't gotten there yet. I'll let you know as soon as I get there. It's also called the City of Wide Shoulders.

Really? Interesting. Now by this point, Pope Clement V, who had brought the papacy to Avignon had been dead for about 30 years and had been succeeded by three popes since. Pope Clement V had given way to Pope John the 22nd. He had passed on the hat to Benedict the 12th, and by the time the Black Death hit Avignon, the man in charge was Pope Clement VI, who just happened to be another fancy horny boy. Clement VI is my boy.

If I was going to choose a pope, Clement VI is my boy, he's an interesting guy, I like to make lick. He was a businessman first, but also science forward. Science forward. Avignon, when you're there at the time period, it's a gross city, but the main thing that they boasted is that they had 11 whorehouses, while Rome only had two. Well, it's a much better city, that isn't it? It's a wild city.

Avignon was small, dirty, smelly, wild winds everywhere. It was difficult to work in Avignon because they said that when you went to go write all of your shit or do everything, you couldn't do it outside because the wind was so bad it would blow all your papers. So everybody would blow your papers all everywhere and not in the fun way. You'd have to go into a room with the shutters drawn in its stinky, smelly little room. You'd have to go in there and smell your own robes all day and write all your lies. Was this quarantine?

You know they call it the windy city, not because of the wind, but because of the corruption. Alcatraz means pelican. Justice corrupt, if not more so than his namesake, Clement VI actually gave an indulgence for murder, trading absolution and public support to Queen Joanna of Naples concerning the suspicious hanging death of her husband in exchange for the entire city of Avignon. If you want to have a, if you're a nerd, okay, this is for nerds. If you really want to see how time has not changed at all, read the story of Queen Joanna of Naples and her celebrity trial that happened in Avignon.

She was a super hot, famous queen that essentially, it's the exact story that we were talking about of what they found funny. She was married to this king, right? She was married to a super hot old, right? He mysteriously died in a bad way, right? Where he was like, it was joke. It was not mysterious at all. Like he was seen hanging from a balcony, he was seen hanging by his neck from the balcony

and then a witness at the scene said that he wasn't dying fast enough. So they saw a fucking silhouette of someone reach up, grabbing by his ankle and fucking yank him down until he was like, come on, come on, fucker, come on, fucker. We've got a botchy ball at 1 PM. I know, I'm trying to kill this guy. I'm making a lot of witnesses. It was very clearly a murder. And they, she was, she was having an affair with, I forget his name, but the affair that

she was having was this guy that was also like the most handsome guy of the realm. He was this like famous kind of lethario. We'll call him David DeCovne the seventh. Yes. Yeah, but they had this very public trial and she had to go and go to the pope and say like, I didn't murder anybody, I'm just a sweet, hot, warm-moon. And then Clement VI being like, all right, well, what the fuck are you going to give me?

Oh, what are we going to do here? We're going to have some kind of an arrangement here. And she just gave him the city of, you know, for 80,000 Klingons or whatever, the fuck them, the amount of the money. It was supposed to be legit that the deal was for 80,000, you had Bing Bongs. Bing Bongs. Wherever the money is, I remember. Franks.

I don't think they used Franks. Maybe it was Florence. I think they used Florence as well. But it was anyway, it was the deal for 80,000 somethings. But for the city of Avignon, but no money ever changed hands. And Pope Clement, of course, came out and called her a woman beyond reproach and completely innocent and gave her absolution for the murder. Guys, it's all gray on one thing, huh?

She's hot, right? Come on in. Come on, y'all. Come on, everybody. Come on. It's cool, right? You're right, man. Things haven't changed.

You look at Casey Anthony. They gave her Tampa. They gave her Tampa. Isn't that nice? So because of the influence of the man at the top, Avignon was a mix of religiosity and sexiness with seven churches, seven monasteries, seven nunneries, and as Henry said, eleven houses of ill repute. Oh, yeah.

Fantastic. I mean, everyone's pretty smelly, but it's fun if you kind of get through it. Honest, true question. If everyone's smelly, is anybody smelly? That's honestly, it does equate that way. We went to Europe. Yeah. Actually, I would say more like we went to Perth.

There was a smell coming from those people, but not all of them, but there was three people in particular. There was a body odor that I, that it was new. It was entirely new. I like a new smell though. It's called the bloomin' onion. But besides just, oh, and also, speaking of Australia, I want to very quickly thank a listener from New Zealand named Laura, who sent me an Australian snacks care package.

Thank you so much. He sent me some Kingston, our nuts Kingston. Stop killing Marcus. Please stop sending him. I don't know. All sugary sweets. No, just keep sending me stuff from Australia. Send him his sweets.

It's what he does. Yeah. And he's also salty as they sent me some chicken crimpies as well, which is my favorite. Chicken crimpies. What the fly of shit. Chicken crimpies sounds like a thing you can't say about somebody anymore, you know? Yeah. Our nuts Kingston chicken crimpies and solos, the best shit in the world.

But besides just horniness, Pope Clement VI was also obsessed with his health, and he employed a medical staff of four surgeons, three barber surgeons, and eight physicians, including one chief physician. He was science-forward. Yeah. His belief was like, because everyone else was saying this is a thing from God, and what Clement VI, because he was this weird kind of modern pope, he was like, yeah, it's from God.

It's from God. Tell me how the fuck can I be safe? Let's save me. Right. And so he had all these doctors go, because he was really trying to weirdly get to the bottom of it. I won't give him a heck of a lot of credit, but he did try to say like, science can maybe do something about this.

He's also, I think he understands that God has nothing to do with it. He's a pope. Yeah. So they're like, oh, I get it, yeah, we've been lying to these motherfuckers for a long time. Yeah, he knows for a fact that the pope doesn't speak to God. But while chief physician for the pope sounds like a plum gig, that man was also in charge of monitoring the papal bowel movements and was required to keep a daily record of the

odor and form of each and every turd that squeezed out of the pope's ass. Someone's got to. Do they? I guess so. Do they have to? I don't know. I don't know. You can deduct that.

You remember that, Kessel. You can deduct that if you pay for that. Yeah. Oh my. And so since the pope obviously put great stock in doctors, he took his physician's advice when the plague arrived. Pope Clement spent most of his time during the plague in Avignon sitting between two roaring fires in the papal chamber because his poop doctor believed that heat would cleanse the

chambers of infected wet air. And again, this doctor was accidentally right because the hot, dry air kept the chambers free of fleas. And since the pope wasn't likely to come into contact with the plague corpse, he survived without so much as a sniffle. The only time I've ever wanted to be a pope is fantasizing about that. I like the two large flames on the side. No.

City in there. Doing God knows what. No. Literally nothing. You go like, um, I'm talking to God from two to six, and you just sit here and I'm like, I'm just doing absolutely nothing. But he is an he's an interesting character because also remember when we were talking about about the what helps the plague spread, it's not just being dirty.

Like I think that that's what we, we were talking about the bathing thing. It's not that it's about the fleas. It's about can the fleas get to you and creating an environment where fleas love to live. But dirty, but dirtiness attracts fleas. I agree. Yeah. Scientifically, like a dirtiness and not washing and not washing clothes and all that. That attracts more and more fleas.

The dirtiness does play a big part in it, but it's not the entire, it's definitely not the entire story, but it is definitely part of it. But outside of the paper walls, Avignon was falling into a horrific chaos. 62,000 people died in the first three months alone and within the city walls, 7,000 houses quickly went vacant while rumors spread that the entire suburbs of Avignon were all dead. You can almost see the HGTV show. Just flipping houses. Oh, plague house flippers, you wait until that's a thing.

That house flippers. Oh my God. This whole family sadly died in COVID, but now we're going to show you this new pergola. The 24-hour grave digging soon filled every graveyard in Avignon to the brim and as a result, nocturnal pigs, night pigs, night pigs with rude corpses from their shallow graves every night until dawn. That's the other gets the rival gang to the east side porkers. It's street pigs versus the night pigs.

Who's got what shift depends on where the sun is. Oh my God, I want to be a night pig so bad. You are, Kissel, don't worry. But when dawn came, citizens of Avignon would see men and women wandering the streets, coughing up bloody mucus until they died where they fell. That's the one thing the two plague movies I watched so far, which was The Seventh Seal and Season of the Witch, which is great. But I forget that a part of the tapestry of 1349 was finding people randomly dying everywhere.

And if you walk the countryside, like, because the Grey Famine brought people to the cities, but there were still people out in the woods and eventually they went in and go in and get supplies. They would all die. Yeah, 90% of the population in Europe at this time was still rural. Yes. Only 10% of the people lived in cities. But they got it because they would have to.

This looks like a job for a night pig. No one's going to eat these carnitas themselves, all the cannibals. But you'd have to go out to the woods to do various shit, like traveling between districts, and you'd just find people dying, just like in the road. I do love the different types of research that you and Marcus do, where your reference is The Seventh Seal and Season of the Witch, and Marcus has a series of books. Oh, I read a couple of books. He did.

He did. He absolutely did. But you have to also get environment. I get it. I'm with you. But when the corpse pigs became a bit too much to bear, Pope Clement VI consecrated the river and hundreds of rotting corpses were thrown into the water day after day to float downstream where they found their watery grave in the Mediterranean Sea.

And as it was in Italy, brother abandoned brother, friend abandoned friend, and parent abandoned child. It was truly every man for himself and Avignon. We really have to stress here that the panic that hit when the plague came really changed human society. The only way I maybe could describe it is like the weird social in America, like especially in New York, the idea of like what changed during 9-11, like that type of thing, where all of a sudden you're like, holy fucking shit, everything's different.

We are panicking. It sends into the whole thing. The plague just fucking, it changed people. We are lucky that the worst it got was people over buying toilet paper and hand sanitizer. It could have been a lot worse. After 9-11? No, that was idiots lining up to the pumps in Lubbock, Texas for gas. That was because our president told our parents to go buy lawn furniture.

I remember. The ultimate solution. The only people in Avignon who actually stood by the sick were the poor house monks who spent their days swabbing pustules, cauterizing boobos, bandaging gangrenous feet, and washing bloodstained floors that never got clean. Oh my god. Man, and that is of course until all of the monks also died of the plague. Sure.

Oh, and after effective all of the clergy dying is that number one, the first wave to die were the good ones. So the ones that were the good priests, the ones that you like, the ones that you could depend on are the good members of the clergy. They all fucking died first. So they actually helped people? They actually helped people. And so a lot of priests just fucking ran.

A lot of monks, they would just leave. They would abandon their posts. Some of them in the wake of all this understood, number two, there's money to be made here. So what we can do is start to pay. You have to pay me for me to show up. Also it's incredibly important for them to get their last rites, right? So they started hitting people up for money, being like, you want me to come? You got to pay me.

And then also the standards for getting priests changed. They dropped the age all the way down. They dropped the age all the way down until all of a sudden you have like a 14 year old is the head of the parish. A 14 year old priest? Yes. Who's the head of the parish going like, oh, God, God, won't you give me a candy apple? Well, that's the only time a 14 year, that's the only time a priest can have sex with another

14 year old. Yeah. Yeah, buddy. Yeah, buddy. That's just two kids having fun. Yes. Yes. I'm nailing it.

But what is truly amazing is that when you compared the response of Marseille, where everyone cared for one another and nobody died alone, to the response of Avignon, where it was every man for himself, the mortality rate was the same, 50%. However, the different responses still very much mattered in the grander scheme because the fear and loathing that Avignon jumped into headfirst had a secondary effect. While the Black Death killed 50% of the population in each town, Avignon had more deaths because unlike Marseille, Avignon turned on its Jewish population like much of Europe did throughout the Black Death.

See Marseille, long known for its tolerance, was the only large city in France and the German-speaking nations to resist anti-Semitism, which ensured that Marseille's population of 2,500 Jews stayed safe for the duration. Which also showed the cultural divide because the southern parts of France, they were hip and they were liberal, and it became this place of a burgeoning art world where you could go and be a poet and make a lot of money, like Petrarch, the guy that this whole thing is being a simp, and that's like what he did. The term Petrarchian love, which means that it's unrequited love, he wrote these series

of poems about one woman that were all his worshiping of this one woman that was married to the person I think that was Marquis de Sade's like grandfather. I think Petrarchian love, it seems like people who only kiss with their teeth. You ever had that? Or you ever had two when you kissed? Avignon, on the other hand, they made bonfires and burned their Jewish neighbors alive in an attempt to slow the plague, and when that didn't work, they fell into resignation and let the plague run its course, feeling no guilt for having wiped out a segment of the

population for no reason at all. In France, more than the other places I've read, they really did slide into a complacency which is really kind of interesting, like they still had big functions, like that big star-studded trial, that was happening during the plague. They traveled in, like there were Ted Cruz going to Mexico, like they traveled in, seriously, they acted like things weren't happening, and they just kind of tried to add, they just tried to add the plague to their normal life, but the thing about the plague is that unlike a certain other type of pestilences, this one killed a lot of fucking people, so they

would be open death while they were doing like half the population. What was the rationale for the anti-Semitism? Why did they, I mean, other than was it just political scapegoating? We're about to spend a long time on that. See anti-Semitism. You sound thrilled, Kessel. It's tragic, yes, but it's also fascinating, because right now we're getting, this is the roots of modern anti-Semitism.

I'm just so happy that I cursed my TV yesterday, I was like, why I'm even alive, because it was like skipping when the great game was on, there was a mass movie month, and I'm just feeling better about where I am. Yeah, yeah, things are good now. See anti-Semitism was by no means a black death invention, but because a large number of European Christians blamed European Jews for the plague, this time period stands as the second largest mass slaughter of Jewish people behind only the Holocaust. Now to understand how the Jewish people became scapegoats for something that killed Jews

at just as high of a rate as anyone else in Europe, we have to understand how a Jewish person fit in to medieval European society. Throughout the early Middle Ages, Jewish people were painted as an enemy of the Christian Church, who made it a part of their doctrine to name Jews sinners and to name them as Christ-Killers, amongst many other accusations. But like being a Christ-Killer wasn't super cool and rad. No, honestly, being a Christ-Killer! No, it sounds like the name of a bad band.

To us it's a really cool band, to them that was like the highest crime in the world, because I guess Jesus Christ was important. Love that white guy. Oh yes, that white Jesus. White, white, white, white Jesus. I love that. Super white Jesus and that thin Santa Claus. In fact, so many sins were attributed to the Jews between the 3rd and 8th century that

an entire literary genre called Edversus Judeos was created just to keep all the accusations straight. These tracks, with familiar names like an answer to the Jews, and unfamiliar names like rhythm against the Jews. And in that term, in that book, the rhythm really does get you. Yeah, the C&C music factory turned to antisemitism at some point. These tracks accuse the Jewish people of committing not only sins, but breaking commandments as a part of their belief structure.

Well, they kind of sort of set it up so that they had to. They kind of put them in the position that they were going to no matter what, but we'll get into it. It is different religions, sure. Well, partly, this was done by early Christians to separate themselves from their Jewish roots. Because as we know, from every single cult we've ever covered, nothing grows a new cult and binds its followers to their beliefs quite like an enemy. The medieval church was obsessed with the idea of the Antichrist and that the Antichrist

himself would be a dude and that they were waiting for this dude to show up, who would be the polar opposite of Jesus Christ, which to them, which I think is interesting, would definitely be Jewish, even though Jesus Christ was Jewish if he was real when he was it. But if you went, if you wanted to say, he started as a Jewish person. And so this idea that they said that whoever would be, he had to be a Jewish person. So we have to constantly look through the Jewish people to see when the Antichrist would pop up. Oh my goodness.

Well, in response, the Orthodox Jews gave as good as they got. They disparaged Jesus Christ as the illegitimate child of a Roman soldier named Panthera. And they also said that Jesus's miracles were tricks and his resurrection was a hoax. But it also seems like the Jews were just talking shit on the new kid, like people were peeling away. If they had to fucking respond somehow, this fucking, this new fucking Christian is going to come in and start talking shit on our ancient religion, which is fucking sick. No.

They're all Abrahamic religions. You would think that they could find some common ground, but I suppose we got to have that enemy. In my mind, this really came from the Christian side. They created this, they created the environment to create the enemy that they needed to live. Oh, it's a Taliban. The Christians, however, took that shit very seriously. And between the first century and the 12th, the European Jewish population dropped from

8 million to 1.5 million. Oh my God. And that was because of the murders and the massacres? They were either killed in pogroms or just run out of the country or run out of the continent. Oh yeah. And then there's also many different ways. You don't just need to mass kill people to kill them. You can put them, you can ghettoize them.

You can make sure that they don't get the resources that they need. You can starve them out. You can make sure that they don't get the medical care that they need, that they die. You basically debase them. You put them into a lower class or cased than everybody else, and so they're not allowed to get the things that you get, and so just living kills them. Okay. Now, the European Jews that stuck it out were also banned from holding most jobs.

So they instead built their own empires by becoming merchants, traders, and most importantly concerning the pogroms and the Black Death, money lenders. See Christians were banned from charging interest on loans to anyone. That's known as usury. And as far as I know, it's still something that Christians aren't supposed to do, right? I guess so. What? Actually, I don't know.

Technically, back in the day, they made it. So it was illegal for a Christian to work in a bank or to do anything like the loan. Not to work in a bank. It was illegal to charge interest on the loan. That's what it was. Yeah. But that's the inherent business of loaning money. See what I mean?

That is how you make money. That's what you do. So what they then did was being like, so the Jewish guy, he can do it. You can do it. But then that means, no matter what you do, the Jewish person just living the job that you gave them as a society is living in sin. They're living anti to what you do. So you have set the scenario where no matter what, we are diametrically opposed.

But you're also borrowing money from that Jewish guy that's the money lender. Because the merchant class has shown, it's the weird, I guess this is like the version of capitalism. Like they start to understand like the merchant class started to get just as big as the knights class, the people who fight class, because they could just buy in, be like, this is new money showing up for the first time. And a lot of it required loans to build all of these new like castles and business ventures and all this kind of shit.

So it led to more people using the loan system. Okay. And Jews were also, they were banned from charging interest on loan to another Jew. But a special dispensation made by Jewish lender said that Jews could charge interest on loans to non-Jews. And thus a path to prosperity for the Jews and a path to resentment from the Christians was born. Okay.

But while owing money to Jewish people certainly didn't help relations, modern anti-Semitism as we still know it today, had its foundations in the crusades of 1096 and the God state that was created as a part of the new militant Christian faith. Do you have that on my 1096 panko card? I could do this all day. This faith produced pogroms, which pogroms are organized massacres. And these pogroms promise to wipe out the Jewish population who are being stereotyped as greedy hook-nosed invaders in art and propaganda for the first time and certainly

not the last. Oh my God. Pogroms sounds like the world's most toothless clown. Pogroms the clown. I'm going to make them laugh. I'm sorry, I couldn't afford the clown with teeth. Please let me die. Can I die?

All right kids, let's kill pogroms. If you want a great comic book about clowns that's out right now, haha is absolutely wonderful. But while imagery and vague accusations are certainly key to whipping up the ire of a community towards a specific group, true hatred comes from a good story. And the original Jewish conspiracy came from East Anglia in the modern day United Kingdom. Do they have am radio back then too? By account, an apprentice named William had been found dead in the forest with his head shaved and his body mutilated by dozens of stab wounds.

From what his mother Elvira said, William had last been seen going into the house of a Jewish neighbor, so the local Jewish community was quickly blamed for this mysterious and shocking murder. And what would be a precursor to tragedies like the Salem witch trials? Two local girls who worked for the Jewish families in town came forward and said that a group of Jews had kidnapped William after temple, which implied conspiracy. They then supposedly gagged him, pierced his head with thorns and bound him to the cross to mock the crucifixion.

Extreme. It does sound that way. From there, the story mutated, and it was soon said that Jews kidnapped Christians and reenact a perversion of the crucifixion every Passover. They just sit for four hours and don't eat. So that's all it is and then you have a big dinner, but by then you're ravenously hungry. So this is almost satanic panic as well. Oh, of course.

A Jewish panic in a way. Dude, dude, dude, dude, absolutely. Because you can see how it evolves from they did it once and the more the story gets told, it happens every year. It's what they do. And it's what they do. It's part of their religion. The story then evolved in an even more bizarre manner, but what's incredible is that this

story is still evolving to this day. From what this game, a telephone had produced, it was becoming widely believed that all Jewish people suffered from terrible hemorrhoids because of something that a Jew had called out to Pontius Pilate after the sentencing of Jesus. We're going back to Pontius Pilate, buddy, this goes back from the started the day that wizard died. Oh, my gosh. Well, no, it was what it goes like the accusation goes back to something that a Jew said to

Pontius Pilate. The Jew apparently said his blood be upon us and our children. And that gave them the curse of hemorrhoids. But did Jewish people have more hemorrhoids than non-Jewish people? I have a feeling they're just spitballing here. But it was said that Jewish sages had told their people that the only relief from these hemorrhoids was the blood of Christian children. Adrenochrome.

Yeah, exactly. And therefore the blood libel legend where Jewish people are said to drink the blood of Christian children was born. So baby eating has been with us for a long time. This is amazing. It's the most hack shit. Yes. Any pizza restaurants back then.

This is before pizza. This is before pizza. This is pre-pizza, but screw going by before Christ and after Christ. We gotta do before pizza and after pizza. This is pre-pizza. This is in a Garfield podcast. Mondays. From there, blood libel grew from a hemorrhoid treatment to the old chestnut of international

Jewish conspiracy. And it was soon said that the Jews sacrificed Christian children in one part of the world every year for no other reason than to scorn Christ. Hear me out, guys. What if they think it's really freaking cool? It's the most metal abortion I've ever heard. But this story, now we're in 1348, technically we had reached some sort of peace. They were living amongst Christian society.

It was still tense. They always talk about there was a tension. But they were allowed because a lot of the papal bulls came forward and they were tried. The papal bulls were issued to say like, we're cool with the Jews. And the reason why they said that they were cool with the Jews is because every pope always assumed, we'll get them in the end. Because they always think, we'll convert them. We'll get them the old way.

But do they even want them converted? Absolutely. They wanted everybody converted. More than anything, they wanted them converted. Because that's extra Christian points. If you convert somebody who doesn't believe in Christianity. Right from your grave. Now by 1348, when the Black Death hit France, Christians were actually committing the mass

acts of violence against Jews that they themselves were accusing the Jews of doing, proving that projection is not a modern invention. It's always been like this, whenever someone's doing a crime, they just say something else is doing the crime. And then everybody believes that the other person's doing the crime because the other guy said it first. Yeah. It's just so ironic as well because they blame Jewish people for killing Jesus who is Jewish.

And then they just go and kill a bunch of Jewish people who are the same religion as Christ. Yeah. It's insane. In New York, European Christians would celebrate Holy Week by attacking and sometimes killing their local Jewish population because they blame the Jews for killing Christ. And they believe that this was a way to exalt the Prince of Peace. So the Purge isn't just a fun movie, it was a lifestyle as well for hundreds of years.

Hundreds of years. Yes. Additionally, the Jewish people were also hated because, as we said, one of the few professions open to Jewish people was money lending, and a lot of people owed a lot of money to Jewish money lenders at this time, mostly because of the great famine. See as author John Kelly put it, the average peasant farmer knew next to nothing about anti-Semitic rantings concerning the international Jew, but he certainly knew about the interest rate he paid on his loan every month, and he absolutely knew about the legbreakers that

these money lenders sometimes deployed. I would love to see, this is a fucking premier television show, the fucking, the money lenders during this time period, like these guys, like these guys going out there and like breaking knees for the bookies, you know, all these people within medieval society. I think it's just called Goodfellas. Therefore, money lending personalized anti-Semitism in a way that the church never could. And as a result, six major outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence burned through Europe before the Black Death even hit.

Mostly these outbreaks were a result of the ruling class using Jewish money lenders as scapegoats for the problems they themselves caused. Or happened to them because of the little optimum, and then all of a sudden you have this deluge comes, and you lose everything, and then you owe all of this money to somebody, and then you sit and you look at your starving people, and then you're like, what if I just kill the guy I owe money to? Yeah, right. But sometimes the Jewish people would get lumped in with other conspiracy theories simply

because people figured that if something sneaky was going down, the Jews had to be involved. Perhaps the best example of this is the so-called Lepper Uprising of 1321, which occurred just two decades before the Black Death. Yes. Oh, I'm interested. I didn't have that in my... Choose a year. You did it, 1321.

Go for it. Bingo card. In this absolute bullshit conspiracy theory, it was said that a whole bunch of lepers had gotten together to overthrow the French crown after a secret meeting in Toulon elected a new king of France as well as a new set of barons and counts. Oh my gosh. All right, guys. Let's go get them.

Who's got the sponges? Hey, Terry. Hey, Terry. Your ear is falling out. You just got too up a piece of gum or something to put on there. I can't go to the revolution without my ears. No. We're ready to leave.

Dude, I love the idea. It reminds me of the famous film Dirty Work, which I reference all the time when the homeless people go and invade the theater. Just a bunch of people with leprosy running to... They are biological weapons. They are... God, that's such a fun... If I had to have leprosy, that's what I would want to do with it.

My deepest darkest fantasies about taking over show business, sometimes the idea of getting together an army of homeless people, where you pay them out money, and then they come with you to the various casting studios, and you just roll over everybody. You just roll over and you build the army, and you build like a snowball going down a hill, and all of a sudden it's an avalanche, and its name is Henry Zabrowski. Yeah, well, you do have to house the homeless after you do that. I will. Okay.

And that's where I promise them. Yeah, man. After he takes over the studios, he's going to be making money hand over fist. Oh, I can't wait. We were making homeless period pieces, we were making homeless sitcoms, I am, but we're doing this. This is real. Now, to give some perspective on lepers in the Middle Ages, leprosy was by far the most

terrifying disease encountered by the medieval European prior to the Black Death. It's gross. I mean, leprosy is still terrifying, but you don't see it every single fucking day of your life, like people in medieval Europe did. Well, nowadays there is also, because just because of the internet, there's so many ways to debunk or what everybody wants to have a hot take on everything, so one hot take I've seen is the, like, leprosy's not as bad as it used to be. And I was like, I know that it's not as bad as it used to be, but it's still leprosy.

Yeah, it's just because we have antibiotics and stuff. Yeah, I think we can treat it now. You didn't treat it, I think it would be as bad as it used to be. I think it gets better. You do melt if you don't have medicine. Over a period of years, when you get leprosy, your fingers and toes melt off, your palms bleed, your body hair and eyelashes fall out, your hands and feet turn to claws, penises putrify, and at some point the bridge of your nose collapses and a smelly liquid constantly

runs from the gaping wound where your nose used to be. Yeah, we talked about this and you get hyper-horse. Yeah. Yeah. That is so frickin' brutal. That's because ulcers grow on your larynx, your teeth fall out, you go blind as your eyes become covered in ulcers, and your skin is covered in large growths of abnormal tissue called nodules.

Yeah, now it's called Hansen's disease because I guess I decided leprosy was too grody and you have to repackage it. Yeah, Hansen's disease, that's way too fancy for what this is. Yeah, but you do just, you get a cream now. Yeah. Now you just get a cream? Now you can get a cream and it beats it. Oh my gosh.

But this is before the cream. Yeah. You're going to want to get that cream. And you know, we still don't know how leprosy is spread. Oh god. We still don't know. Oh god. I think it's probably, we think it's probably airborne, but we don't know.

Much like the movie Pontypool, perhaps it's in our words. How? I don't know, but you've ever seen that movie? Yeah, I like Pontypool. Yeah, yeah. I love Pontypool. Maybe it's comedy podcast that started it all. Well, you just got it.

You have leprosy now, congrats. Don't worry, it's not bad. Don't worry, it's not bad anymore. But what all this added up to was that people were terrified of lepers and lepers were therefore treated as the lowest members of society until they died of the disease. And as we know, people in power are always scared of the people they treat the poorest. So when a rumor began circulating that the lepers were about to rise up in France, King Philip V, known interestingly as the long one.

He ordered mass arrests of all the lepers everywhere. I just feel like that's got to be a hard time for a cop. Yeah. So you want us to go all of them? Yeah. So how do we cuff up? Their hands are melted off. Honestly, I threw a net on one and he just slid right through it.

The lepers who quote unquote, confessed immediately were burned at the stake while the others were tortured until they confessed. Then they were burned at the stake. Okay. So just skip them. Just go right to the confession. Yeah. Yeah.

But since the lepers were supposedly rising up, a lot of Europeans figured that the Jews were probably involved as well. And since both Jewish money lenders and leper assailants were cash rich, they both made lucrative targets for scapegoating and mass murder. Because that was the bonus on scapegoating the Jewish people, is that not only did you kill somebody to get the attention away from yourself, you also made a little bit of money doing it. Damn.

Now, as we said earlier, most Europeans believed that the Black Death was a result of divine judgment. But as we also know about Christians, very few of them think of themselves as bad people. Yeah. You remember Dennis Rader went to church every week. Yeah. Well, he wrote poems. But the Christians also knew that God was mad at them.

And if God is angry, then they had to ask, why is God angry? Why are you angry, God? The answer, of course, is sin. Oh, I thought you were going to say young Sheldon. Oh, I was gathering that. You take that show down a peg, Andrew. No, my friend met Hobby works on there, and honestly, he really needs to work. And I'm honestly, I hope for the continued success of young Sheldon.

Oh my God, what's wrong with you? I don't know. Wow. I had therapy this morning. I guess you did. That was the most. I'm weak. I'm weak.

Very sweet of you. Well, the answer to why is God angry is, of course, sin. And since this was the worst thing that ever happened, it had to have been caused by the worst sin. And the worst sin, Ben, as you probably know, not believing in God. Oh my God, I thought you were going to say God was so angry because of his raging case of hemorrhoids. He had the Jewish problem.

Oh my God. So not believing in God is the biggest sin that there is. That's the worst sin that there is. You can fucking murder a million people. It's still not as bad as not believing in God. Yeah, because you could buy a soul coupon that fixes that for you if you want to. Makes all the sense in the world. But if you're a European Christian, then you believe in God and everyone you know believes

in God. But the Jews don't believe in your God. And it just so happened that a lot of European Christians owed a lot of money to Jewish money lenders. Oh my goodness. But guess what? They do believe in the same God. Absolutely.

Of course, they're both Abrahamic religious. But they don't believe in Jesus. Who is God? Because it's the Trinity. Jesus was just the guy who spoke. You know what I mean? Jesus is like the president. It's not the Congress.

It's the Trinity. You know what I mean? Jesus is the guy who's hot. I'm torn every day between worshiping money and worshiping water. You might, and Carol. So a lot of European Christians decided to blame the Black Death on European Jews. And many of them figured that even if the Jews didn't cause the plague, who gives a shit?

Because at the very least, all your debts are going to get wiped out in the process. That's the key here is that you do things that also profit you. So they do this. Well, they are actually doing it under the sort of, that's their validation is the pogrom. The pogrom is their validation. Right. They are saying like, oh, we have to do it because they commit the ultimate sin. But the real motivation's money.

And then the same thing that's going on with the weird ways they have whipped up people to go fight against the government, calling the 2020 election illegitimate, all that kind of shit. It's supposed to, like, they think that they're doing it for some form of cultural revolution. But actually, it's so a bunch of billionaires can save on their taxes. Oh, isn't that nice. It's also so they can squeeze that last little bit of money out of their supporters. Yeah, because you know how wealthy they are.

Oh, God knows. I say take all their money. I don't think so. You hold a bunch of them together and that adds up. Sad. It is very sad. We actually talk about that on Topbat this week, about how oftentimes the poorest of us are the ones who are built the most.

They are. Yeah, of course. Well, as far as how the Jewish people were supposed to have spread the plague, conspiracy theorists returned to an accusation that they'd used for centuries any time they felt the need to start a pogrom. Well poisoning. One story said that a rabbi named Jacob confessed to masterminding a plot with a network of agents to deliver packets of plague poison to Jews throughout Europe, all in a bid for

Jewish world domination. After extreme torture, Rabbi Jacob said that he gave leather pouches the size of eggs to agents with names like the Bullying Provenzol, the Kind-hearted Merchant, the Maternal Belita, and the compliant barber surgeon Balavigny. That's perfect. I love Balavigny. I love Balavigny. But they also had Jet Lee, the acrobat.

Do you remember that? Of course. Because he comes through the vets and he's the one who can dodge all the lasers. I love Jet Lee. Yes. And these leather pouches were packed with a poison made from lizards, frogs, spiders, holy communion wafers, and finally, the hearts of Christians. Ah, yes.

Folks, the only way to get rid of the plague is this new tactical bath. I'm telling you, you're going to love the tactical bath to make your balls feel like freedom. These plague poisons would then be dropped into wells, causing plague outbreaks all across Europe, or so the conspiracy theory said. A question, though, now was the well, was that I would assume that was a area where perhaps it could spread the black plague, though, right? Oh, it's interesting.

Drinking water and stuff like that. If you dropped a fucking plague body down there, then yeah. Sure. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I saw the Walking Dead TV show. They did it with a zombie. There is also the inconvenient, tiny facts and hooks that conspiracy theories lie on

and can hold and hang from, which is shit like they noticed that the Jewish people very often did not drink from the town well, because oftentimes they were ghetto-ized. They were when these like walled off contingents inside of homes, right? So they wouldn't, sometimes they wouldn't even drink from the communal well. They would go to the river upstream of where the shit was and drink from the clean water from where, because they understood that shit water is making some people sick. And some of these people are just wanting to drink in shit water. We're not.

The well sometimes can have a dead chicken in it. You know what I mean? Like someone throw a bunch of garbage in it and a bunch of people get sick. So they go and they drink from the stream. So they started seeing things like that saying they're suspicious of the wells themselves. And so they started forbidding, that was, so the towns started forbidding all people from drinking any wells. Wells were all chained up and blocked up.

So they went to go drink the shit river water and got extra sick because of it. As far as how these false confessions were extracted, authorities use special tortures reserved only for Jewish people. In one, a crown of thorns was placed on the prisoner's head, then the thorns would be smashed into the skull with a hammer. Do they not have any sense of irony? None. None.

None. And another, a rope of thorns would be placed between the prisoner's legs and yanked up into the crotch. The pogroms that came as a result of these widespread, baseless conspiracy theories were brutal and swift, spreading through France, Sweden, and modern-day Germany with a viciousness that rivaled the Nazis. The more level-headed of medieval Europeans were quick to point out that if the Jews were responsible for the plague, then they shouldn't be dying at the exact same rate as everyone

else. Jews also died at the plague. That's where you don't understand because it's the double cover. It's double cover. They kill themselves the same rate so that we think that they're not in on it. Exactly. As we know from our recent troubles, once a conspiracy theorist believes that his or her cause is righteous, no amount of logic will ever break their stride.

I would have to say if I could go back in time, I would not want to be a level-headed. I would want to be really stupid because I feel like that's the only way to survive is to just be really dumb and just keep on pushing forward. We've talked about this in various contexts, but I really do. It's really interesting to see through history and various eras, modern people are born throughout all of time. There's always a contingency of people who are like, what the fuck is happening? There's some reason modern, cool people are born in every year and they just so happen

to be born in 1348 instead of 1977. Hipster fashion. That was just fashion. That was just fashion. It's a nude life. You actually hit upon something there. Some doctors believed that being intelligent actually made you more likely to get the plague and the surefire way to avoid the plague was to be as stupid as fucking possible.

I get it, man. Why not? What are you saying? Is this the movie The Jerk? Why not? That's incredible. It makes just as much sense as all this other weird stuff. It does.

Well, on Palm Sunday, 1348 in Toulon, right when the fucking plague hit France, 40 Jews were dragged from their homes in the middle of the night to be murdered, mutilated, and hung by poles to rot in the town square, while Avignon was doing much the same. Soon after, the conspiracy theories spread to the German-speaking regions, and the towns of Zolden, Zofingen, Stuttgart, Reutlingen, Hegerlach, and Lindau killed their entire Jewish populations, either burning them to death or slaughtering them with pikes, axes, or scythes. I still don't understand why it did.

It was at its biggest fever pitch in the Germanic regions, and I don't know why it has this hold on them for so long, where the most Jewish people during the time period were all killed in that same area where the Holocaust happened. And I don't know why. I guess they obviously must connect, like they obviously do, but it is weird to see how it plays out over fucking 600 years. I didn't have a good time to mention this, but my aunt and uncle had a great cure hotel in Stuttgart, and that was where I had my first beer there.

I had my first beer mixed with Coca-Cola in Stuttgart. It's a beautiful place. I bet it is. I bet it is. And they were very nice. Oh, god. They're nicer now. You have to feel the pain in my chest.

No. Government subsidized. When Strasburg, they stripped the Jewish population naked and marched them into bonfires in the cemetery. And in Brandenburg, they cooked them to death on a large grill, like meat. See, because we're civilized, you see, that's what we do, because we're civilized people. It's now it's dinner. Jesus.

In towns across France, Germany, and soon Switzerland, Jews were given the choice to either convert or burn. And while a few did convert, most of them threw themselves into the fire rather than risk baptism. Some documents even allege that between November 1348 and September 1349, all of the Jewish people between Cologne and Austria were burnt and killed. Oh, my god. What was truly horrifying is that while some of these towns killed their Jewish population

while the Black Death was raging around them, some killed them before the Black Death even arrived, just in case it would stop the plague. It also just shows what conspiracy theory does. Yeah, they got the theory first before the plague. And so they tried to retrofit it, yes, to the reality. Now we have no idea just how many Jewish people were killed as a result of conspiracy theories during the Black Death. But what's ironic is that European Christians killed so many Jewish people during this amount

of time that the amount of corpses left behind a rot did what else but increase the rat population, which spread the Black Death even further and even fucking faster. I'm not going to say that they deserve it, but it is an interesting direct correlation to the mass murders that they did. It is. No, and all this shit is still the same today. You fucking replace blood with Adrena Chrome and Jews with Hollywood Elite and it's QAnon. And then of course you have conspiracy the way that it works because people can't rationalize

what's been done where they just, then the other conspiracy is it never happened. Sure. That sure also was something that conspiracy theorists believed after they did something horrible. They're like, well, that never happened. So there are whole schools of thought that say that the plague never happened, right? The plague never happened. Oh, yes.

There's people who say that it didn't happen that it was that it was like, don't know. They were like that kind of shit where it's like the bubonic plague wasn't the center of it. It was all of these other things. There's so many ways to wrap all of these things around and change things as they go. That's the weirdest thing about conspiracy theorists is that they will believe them worst shit about certain groups of people to avoid facing the fact that life is chaos and awful things happen to everybody.

Absolutely. And sometimes it splatters. And sometimes what happens is that it is an invisible force because think about this. The virus is an invisible force. It is bacteria. In this case, right? The bacteria, you can't see it. So all of these people are dying.

All you see is the results and you just can't maybe wrap your mind around the fact that because what what else feels like God's true judgment than a plague and then a disease? Because it's also been written about in the Bible that you've been thinking about this for a long time. It's been a part of the tapestry of your belief. And so you really do believe this is the most present God has ever been, weirdly too, because you're seeing what you believe is the direct action of God happening all around you and you're freaking out because it might also people I think also might even freak out at

the idea that you're confirming your belief in God as well because you just start to like think, oh, fuck, oh, fuck, I have to clean up. I got to do all of this kind of shit. But instead of I need to be better, it's what can I do to get this rage out? What can I do to punish somebody else so that they can experience the fear that I'm experiencing so that they can they can be punished instead of me? If God is like this omnipresent force that controls all of the universe, spend a little bit more time on Mars like you can just go work on Earth, dad, just get out of here

go go take care of that place. Life is chaos, though. Sometimes you're just driving down the highway next thing you know you're dead because Caitlyn Jenner hit you with a car. Absolutely, man. You can win a million dollars or you can get your dick ripped off by a bunch of trows. You don't know what's gonna happen. You don't know.

You don't know. But it's also like that this sort of like this anti-Semitism, this extreme violence. It's also a form of laziness, you know, because you don't have to change anything about yourself. You can put everything on another person and I can make my I can make myself better in the eyes of God by killing somebody else instead of changing who I am and what I do. Of course. I mean everything is just being done by shit-covered maniacs. Yeah.

This is just stinky, crazy mobs of people. It's horrifying. The worst century to be alive. Yes, I think you guys are correct on that. But even though many, many Europeans reacted to the Black Death in just about the worst way that they could, there were still men of science in places like Paris who were trying to discover the true causes of the plague. Ooh, like Beekman from Beekman's World.

Also there was a huge ride on that show. There was a huge ride on that show. Oh my god. The new gayliness that we mentioned earlier wrote and released 24 tracks about the Black Death with names like Description and Remedy for Avoiding the Disease in the Future, a very useful inquiry into the horrible sickness, and is it from Divine Wrath that the mortality of these years precedes? We didn't catch your titles.

Do you're happy? Now while the methods for preventing the plague were scattershot at best, these men mostly agreed that the best defense against the plague was to stay healthy and avoid bad air in hot and humid areas. One physician, however, disagreed and said that the antidote for bad air was more bad air. He came upon this conclusion after he noticed that latrine attendants and anyone working a malodorous job seem to be immune.

I think anybody who works inside of a toilet is probably immune to a lot of diseases. Is there some rationale when it comes to if you get it first, do you have an immunity to it? No. Well no, there is no immunity to the plague. It's bacteria. You can get it again and again. There is none.

I think one possible reason why latrine attendants died in smaller numbers was because people who worked in shit were some of the few people who bathed in the river every day after work. Ironically, the cleanest of them all, because people still didn't like shit, right? No, they didn't. So they had to put rules in place in the mid-1300s to clean up some of the shit, right? They had to go, there's a lot of shit everywhere, we're trying to put it in a specific area in the shit river. Barry, can you just stop shitin' there on the street and just go down there to the

little outhouse with the latrine, please? Seriously, and so now you have the rules. What kind of rules are these? Stop signs are coming next. Eat belts. What's happening here? There's people of shit right here in this goddamn street and I gotta go to the latrine. Try to control my freedom.

You can control me. You can start with the asshole. Then they start controlling your mind. I'll shit wherever I want. I just shit in my pants. Okay. Yeah, I'm my own sovereign citizen inside of my own pants. Man, I'm just so happy we're never gonna get that fucking plague, dude, we're so safe.

I got this cough. Yes, cause you're cool, dude. Let's go get hammered. But the shit attendants would also then wash in the stream and get everything and then the Jewish people would say to me like, why don't we go up a couple of yards? It reminds me every morning I wake up and there is poops because I have little dogs and it's just sometimes you're just like, can it stop happening? Yeah.

Can biological beings stop shitin', please? Plug it up. Yeah. But because these people like they wash themselves in the river every day after work and they wash all the shit off of their clothes every day after work, they didn't have as many encounters with fleas as say somebody who like a farmer who never took a bath, who never washed his clothes. Right.

But even so, on this physician's advice, the bad air after bad air guy, people could be seen during the Black Death crouching over the trenches leading from public latrines, inhaling as much shit smell as they could get into their noses to ward off the plague. What is it with anti-semitism in the love of shit, a tradition carried on by Hitler himself. And that wasn't the only bad after bad remedy related to feces. One treatment for plague boobos was to cover them in human shit and blood. No.

Dude, that is just not right. The plague was so bad that physicians were willing to try anything to get people of the relief. You wanted to cover in shit? You wanted to cover in shit? I'd cover in shit. I don't want to be covered in shit. I'm gonna have a loss here.

I don't even think it's going to work. Well, they're just trying whatever gross shit they can try. I mean, do you think about it like anti-biotics that's mold? We were just trying whatever gross shit we could try and they were doing the same and if someone's dying of the plague and they're just barely conscious, yeah, smear some shit on the boobos, see if it helps. But these plague tracks did have some helpful information. They recommended a nutritious diet in avoiding stress and depression, which the Parisian

doctors, I fucking love this, they actually wonderfully described it as accidents of the soul. Oh, things are just cooler in France. They do like say things with more poetic license in France. No. I mean, they did just, we talked about how they were sniffing shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but then they made it into a nice poem. And this actually worked, I mean, good diet and lower stress, both of those things raises

your immune system and a raised immune system helped to prevent the plague. The only thing that beats COVID is vitamin D and zinc. That's it. That's the only thing that gets it. And only take your COVID advice from this show. The one thing you might have noticed is that the vast majority of these tactics are about avoiding the plague in the first place because when it came to treating the plague after the fact, physicians had very little idea on what to do.

There was, of course, the standard bleeding and purging. And there was a sort of logic as to where they should bleed and for how long it just didn't work. It just killed the patient faster. The best advice they had was that when you knew the plague was coming, run far and run fast. Yep. Just to start screaming.

Seriously, just get out of town. Get out of town. Oh, gosh. But most people couldn't run or they wouldn't run. And the vast majority simply waited for the plague to come. And you knew the Black Death was on its way. You knew it was weeks away and you knew when it was days away. Finally, the plague would arrive.

And when it arrived in Paris, it claimed 50,000 people in just the first six months. Wow. Did they, you know what we kind of did it with COVID by making like the little spore look like a personality. Like it was from that stupid ass flow. Lonex commercial or whatever. Oh, yes. Did they, what's that called when you humanize something?

Anthropomorphizing. Did they do that with this? I mean, because when you think about like the Bible and stuff you talk about like the death coming and wiping all the lambs, blood on the door and all that shit, like they really made it tangible. Did they do that with this as well? They didn't know. They didn't have a concept for the plague being an organism.

Well, that's kind of what they attributed to the Antichrist. The Antichrist was supposed to be the person that this was, all of this was happening because the Antichrist was here. It was going to set up the final day. So basically you want to be the, you don't want to be the last guy in town when the plague came because then they're like, you just showed up to me. You did it. You're out of here.

From France, the plague moved on to France's enemy, England, which is where we'll end our series on the black death next week. Oh my God. This is, I'm just going to, this is a pretty interesting subject. It is. Isn't it? It's crazy. I can't believe we went all the way from smelling shit in a latrine to talking about the papacy.

This is fantastic stuff. And next week we're going to get into Marcus and I's favorite, the flagellants. Yay! I'm excited. I can't wait. And we'll talk about more of the far reaching implications of the plague. This is, I mean, I'm endlessly fascinated. I want to be in medieval times.

No, you do not. You know what it is about. You could even go camping with me. No, I can't. No, no, no, no, no, no. Eat through time traveling binoculars. I think that humans, while deeply flawed during this time period and awful at the same time, there's something intrinsically, there's so condensed humanity, there's so much condensed

humanity in the medieval times where you really are, they're passionate, intense, fucked up. There's moments of pure beauty and joy as you see eventually when you get to the renaissance, all that kind of shit. There are people saying the renaissance is actually stinkier than the medieval times, which is interesting. Is that right? I guess because of the fashion.

Oh, stinky fashion. Okay. Stinky fashion, but there's just something about like, this is fucked up and interesting as hell. It really is. Well, the Middle Ages, it's the part of why it's so fascinating is because it is the beginning of modern society. You can see so many things that are still echoed in modern times where, you know, something

that may have happened a thousand years earlier or even 500 years earlier, it's a little too far removed. But with medieval times, like you can still go out and see this shit, you know, the castles are still there. I'm pretty sure we showed a video of a man swimming in an outhouse at Bonnaroo, swimming in human shit. They're out there. They love it.

People still love to smell dookie. Plague was in Colorado last week when we were there. Was it? Yes, squirrels with plague were found. What? And then, oh yes, somebody died of the plague in Florida not that long ago. What we talked about the bubonic plague as well recently, somebody got that. That's still around.

It still pops up, but next week we're going to conclude. I'm very, very excited. I want to give a shout out to my sister, Jackie Ziprowski. She's starting a new Twitch show with a sex therapist where she's going to talk about her icky parts. I can't listen. I can't watch a show. It's not her icky parts.

It's the biological part. On her, it's an icky part. It's not. It's your sister. She's wonderful and beautiful. But it's twitch.tv slash ono. It's Jackie. She's doing on Tuesday nights.

You should check it out. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. Well, hell yeah. That's awesome. We're going to tease that we have live dates. We have live dates and we're going to let you know as soon as we can. We are just teasing you because that's what we were told to do. We're teasing you.

Me or Nina. I hate that. Yeah, I don't. We're teasing you, but we can't say anything. So why are we teasing you? We're doing what we were told. We were told to do this in the worst way possible, evidently. Yes, we do have some live shows coming up.

So excited. We will let you know in the very near future. We got a bunch of dates and we can't wait to go to a town near you. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode. We hope you're enjoying summer. It's getting hot out there. So enjoy it. It really is.

And yeah, indeed. I hope everyone is healthy and not have the bubotic plague or whatever. I mean, if you have it, honestly, you can get antibiotics. You can beat it now. Yeah. And who needs it knows if you have leprosy, let it go. And we're going to say goodbye. But right after this, we're going to leave with what I think is the best rendition I've

heard of what someone brought up to me was I think called Bard Corps, which is a style of modern, modern medieval music. This is from Beatle the Bard Corps. We're going to play a version of everybody's favorite song, Wet-Ass Pussy. Oh, Wet-Ass Pussy. It starts in the butt, it drips down to the pussy. Yeah. And I'd also like to give a shout out to Howie over at Feral Boy Knives, who sent me this

fantastic, insanely cool knife and a knife case that I put on my mouth. Marcus and I were talking knives are cooler than guns, so let's get into knives. Yeah. All right, everyone. I hope you're happy and safe and healthy out there. Hail yourselves. Hail Satan. Oh, hell, game.

Magoos dilations, everybody. Hell, man. Ooh. This is actually pretty awesome. Yeah, it's kind of like dark. Was this, would this be a traditional sound back then? I don't know. Okay.

I mean, not the Cardi B lyrics. Yeah, I don't fucking know. This show is made possible by listeners like you. Thanks to our ad sponsors, you can support our shows by supporting them. For more shows like the one you just listened to, go to lastpodcastnetwork.com.