ExecutedToday.com

On this date in 1979, the only anonymous photograph to win a Pulitzer Prize captured nine Kurdish rebels and two of the Shah’s policemen executed by firing squad in revolutionary Iran.

This shot, one of a series taken of the event with the permission of the judge who condemned the men to immediate death in a half-hour trial at the Sanandaj airfield, ran the next day in the Iranian paper Ettela’at, whose editor prudently kept the photographer’s identity secret. Within two days, the stunning photo had rocketed around the world.

It won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography the following spring, still credited anonymously.

Two years ago, the Wall Street Journal revealed — with the photographer’s permission — the identity of the man who shot this indelible image: Jahangir Razmi, who had gone on to a career as one of Iran’s top photographic journalists. He came to New York to collect the prize 27 years late.

The article breaking the story is still available on the Journal’s website, and on the personal site of reporter Joshua Prager. An NPR story discussing the search for Razmi’s identity is here.

On this date in 1676, two starkly contrasting women were executed for sorcery in Stockholm.

Anna Simonsdotter Hack — also known as “Tysk-Annika” — is the forgotten one of the pair, who played the expected role of a condemned witch and meekly gave herself over to the judgment. There were rewards for good behavior: Tysk-Annika had her head cleanly lopped off.

Malin Matsdotter, however, did not plan any reciprocal back-scratching with the men who came to kill her.

Accused by her own daughters of carrying their children — Malin’s grandchildren — to Satanic masses, “Rumpare-Malin” obstinately refused to cop to the charge. (Naturally, not confessing was a further indicator to the court that Satan was fortifying her defiance.) Without a confession, the authorities couldn’t assuage themselves by giving her the easy-ish death of decapitation; the law required burning at the stake.* A sack of gunpowder around the neck to speed things up was the best they could offer her.

Matsdotter maintained her innocence to the stake, frustrating the confessors, and when one of her daughters called on her to admit the crime, “she gave her daughter into the hands of the devil and cursed her for eternity.”

And maybe it worked. Judges may well have been wearying of the eight-year-old witch craze, but Matsdotter’s discomfiting end was the turning point; the cases dried up, existing sentences were overturned, and the clergy was summoned to draw a line under the proceedings by announcing from the pulpits that witches had been driven out of Sweden for good. Only one more witchcraft execution ever took place in Sweden — and that in 1704.

By the end of 1676, several of the most notorious accusers in the witch trials were being hunted for perjury by those very same courtrooms. Reportedly, Matsdotter’s daughter was herself executed for her fatal accusation.

* Previously, the law had not allowed a witchcraft execution without a confession, and in a notable case a few years before Matsdotter’s burning, two other women had escaped death by refusing to confess. Evidently, they closed that loophole.

On this date in 1628, a prepubescent boy went to the stake at Würzburg, the victim of a witch-hunting spasm amid the confusion of the Thirty Years’ War.

Here is the story as related by Midelfort’s Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562-1684:

Bernhard Reichardt, a magistrate and wealthy man of Markelsheim, had tried to give his young son, Johan Bernhard, a decent education by sending him to school at Neuen Münster in Würzburg. In December of 1627, however, the father became convinced that his son had been seduced into witchcraft there, and transferred Johan Bernhard to the Jesuit school at Dettelbach. By mid-March 1628 the authorities in Würzburg were aware that this nine-year-old boy had been involved in witchcraft and wrote politely to the Teutonic Order in Mergentheim to ask for assistance in extraditing the child to Würzburg for questioning. Johann Caspar, Administrator of the Teutonic Order, responded at once that the boy was to be delivered up formally to the authorities at the border. By the end of March he was under the jurisdiction of the Würzburg authorities. Far from merely questioning him, the Würzburg court got Johan Bernhard to sign a confession on April 8 that he had been seduced into witchcraft by a classmate. Among other horrors, he had denied God, Mary, and all the saints and angels. With his own blood he had written “Ich, Johannes Bernhardus Reichard, hab mich dem Teüfel vergeben.” He had flown to numerous dances and, although only nine years old, had had intercourse with the devil on numerous occasions. Like adults, Johan Bernhard always found the devil “hard as horn” and “of a cold nature.” Implicating his complices, the boy noted that he had seen three other persons known to him at the dances.

One month later, on May 9, 1628, the authorities at Würzburg burned Johan Bernhard Reichardt and four others. Johann Caspar in Mergentheim heard of the execution only after it had occurred, but agreed fully that it had been justified.

Little Johan was far from the only child prosecuted as a witch in Europe, and many very young children number among the casualties of the Würzburg witch trials. With Catholic and Protestant armies romping back and forth over German principalities, it was a ripe moment for feeling the presence of existential threats to the civilization … and for trying children as adults.

Midelfort, again:

[A] “New Treatise on the Seduced Child-Witches” thundered against the rapid increase in childhood witchcraft. The author asserted that the first reason for such conditions was the sins of the parents, for whom witch-children were a fitting punishment. But more important, such witchcraft was due to the sins of the children themselves. One should not think that they were innocent merely because they were young. Their cursing, coveting, and immoral words and games were proof enough that these children had fallen into mortal sin.

And why, after all, shouldn’t children be witches? Everybody else was. The chancellor of Würzburg’s Catholic Prince-Bishop wrote a comrade in the summer of 1629:

As to the affair of the witches, which Your Grace thinks brought to an end before this, it has started up afresh, and no words can do justice to it. Ah, the woe and the misery of it — there are still four hundred in the city, high and low, of every rank and sex, nay, even clerics, so strongly accused that they may be arrested at any hour … a third part of the city is surely involved … there are children of three and four years, to the number of three hundred, who are said to have had intercourse with the Devil. I have seen put to death children of seven, promising students of ten, twelve, fourteen, and fifteen.

In the version of this story preserved in Mackay’s Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, desperate public demonic incantations repeated by “witches” who were either persuaded of their own guilt or hopeless of any source of aid save the infernal were absorbed by youngsters’ timeless instinct for that which is forbidden by their elders, further feeding the frenzy:

Many an unhappy urchin, who in a youthful frolic had repeated it, paid for his folly the penalty of his life. Three, whose ages varied from ten to fifteen, were burned alive at Wurzburg for no other offence. Of course every other boy in the city became still more convinced of the power of the charm. One boy confessed that he would willingly have sold himself to the devil, if he could have raised him, for a good dinner and cakes every day of his life, and a pony to ride upon. This luxurious youngster, instead of being horsewhipped for his folly, was hanged and burned.

However locally and temporarily overwhelming this current, it was never without resistance — everyday people willing to complain that charges were absurd, judges inclined to skepticism. An onset of acquittals was known to presage the end of a witch-hunting spasm.

A particular voice left to us is Friedrich von Spee, a Jesuit theologian whose tract Cautio Criminalis — Precautions for Prosecutors — accepted the existence of witches but argued forcefully against the legal apparatus of accusation and torture. To Spee’s mind, not two in fifty burned witches were truly in league with the devil, and his book quickly became influential to both Catholic and Protestant audiences. It remains in print down to the present day

On this date in 1315, an obscure petty noble who had become the king’s right-hand man was hanged by his rivals a few months after his royal sponsor expired.

Late in the epoch-making reign of King Philip the Fair — under whose rule the papacy was hijacked to Avignon and the Templars were crushed — Enguerrand de Marigny was the man loyally keeping the books.

Since Philip was a stubbornly spendthrift fellow, that meant Marigny’s chief pursuit was the creative extraction of new revenues, through fresh taxes and the debasement of coinage. His public esteem suffered commensurately, little aided by the fact that his duties made him fabulously wealthy and the most powerful man in the country, give or take a king.

Said monarch was vigorous in that age-old pastime of the feudal monarchy, centralization of the power scattered among the nobility, further to which end he was happy to promote a competent administrator of scanty lineage and dependable loyalty.

Aggrieved lords, like the grasping Charles de Valois, were ready with their grudges against the unpopular minister when Philip shuffled off in November 1314. When charges of financial impropriety didn’t stick, they cooked up an allegation of sorcery — just then coming into vogue as a trump card in the game of judicial homicide.

Enguerrand hung two years upon the monumentally terrifying Montfaucon Gibbet (the link is to the structure’s French Wikipedia page), but everyone felt just terrible about it later. (the link is French, again) An actual inquiry — they skipped that step when they strung him up — exonerated the luckless minister, allowing his heirs to retrieve his body and a chunk of his fortune from the sympathetic king; Charles was so pursued by guilt that on his deathbed, he sent out a fat dispensation of alms with the request that recipients pray for both Enguerrand de Marigny and himself.

It worked … at least for Marigny’s reputation.

None can tell, after this lapse of time, whether this remorse proceeded from weakness of mind or sincerity of heart, and which of the two personages was really guilty; but, ages afterwards, such is the effect of blind, popular clamor and unrighteous judicial proceedings, that the condemned lives in history as a victim and all but a guileless being. (Source)

It was no hard feelings from Enguerrand’s little brother, Jean. The family influence had landed him a bishopric, and he held the job until his death in 1350, even repelling an English siege of Beauvais during the Hundred Years’ War.

A European Ham?

Enguerrand de Marigny comes in for a passing notice as T.H. White affectionately surveys the Middle Ages in The Once and Future King:

What an amazing time the age of chivalry was! Everybody was essentially himself — was riotously busy fulfilling the vagaries of human nature … [a] coruscating mixture of oddities who reckoned that they possessed the things called souls as well as bodies, and who fulfilled them in the most surprising ways.

…

[Y]ou might have seen Enguerrand de Marigny, who built the enormous gallows at Mountfalcon, [sic] himself rotting and clanking on the same gallows, because he had been found guilty of Black Magic.*

That Marigny erected the gallows on which he hung is an oft-repeated claim, an instance of a whole subgenre of moralistic folklore in which death-dealing inventors are hoisted on their own petard. These stories are not always dependable — contra rumor, for instance, Dr. Guillotin was not guillotined — and today’s protagonist may not have a firm hold on this small consolation, either.

Here is Victor Hugo’s rendering of the structure’s history in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Montfauçon was, as Sauval says, “the most ancient and the most superb gibbet in the kingdom.” …

Let the reader picture to himself, crowning a limestone hillock, an oblong mass of masonry fifteen feet in height, thirty wide, forty long, with a gate, an external railing and a platform; on this platform sixteen enormous pillars of rough hewn stone, thirty feet in height, arranged in a colonnade round three of the four sides of the mass which support them, bound together at their summits by heavy beams, whence hung chains at intervals; on all these chains, skeletons; in the vicinity, on the plain, a stone cross and two gibbets of secondary importance, which seemed to have sprung up as shoots around the central gallows; above all this, in the sky, a perpetual flock of crows; that was Montfauçon.

At the end of the fifteenth century, the formidable gibbet which dated from 1328, was already very much dilapidated; the beams were wormeaten, the chains rusted, the pillars green with mould; the layers of hewn stone were all cracked at their joints, and grass was growing on that platform which no feet touched. The monument made a horrible profile against the sky; especially at night when there was a little moonlight on those white skulls, or when the breeze of evening brushed the chains and the skeletons, and swayed all these in the darkness. The presence of this gibbet sufficed to render gloomy all the surrounding places.

The mass of masonry which served as foundation to the odious edifice was hollow. A huge cellar had been constructed there, closed by an old iron grating, which was out of order, into which were cast not only the human remains, which were taken from the chains of Montfauçon, but also the bodies of all the unfortunates executed on the other permanent gibbets of Paris. To that deep charnel-house, where so many human remains and so many crimes have rotted in company, many great ones of this world, many innocent people, have contributed their bones, from Enguerrand de Marigni, the first victim, and a just man, to Admiral de Coligni, who was its last, and who was also a just man.

Hugo — who, let us admit, is not to be depended upon for history — has elevated Marigny to the very first victim of the Montfaucon gallows, but the reader will also notice that the same passage dates the edifice’s construction thirteen years after Marigny’s own execution.

Helpless Historiography

Montfaucon the execution site had a rich history. There seem to have been at least two separate gallows sites (the link is French) on the hill, and its vintage as an execution space dates back to the 13th century. (more French)

About this point, this blog runs against the limits of its writer’s access to primary documentation and werewithal to pursue it. Sources seem mightily confused on the embryonic era of Montfaucon; at least two other ministers — Pierre de Brosse, a confidante of the previous king, and Pierre Remy, another royal treasurer hanged a generation after Marigny — also have their own claim to have been hanged on the structure they erected.

It may be that this wa actually true of Remy, a less dramatically captivating figure with an official portfolio similar to Marigny’s, and the two simply became conflated in legend. Something certainly seems to have been built during his time, and it may have been the stone replacement for the original gallows.

The suggestion of someone who researched it more thoroughly than I have (another French page, but worth the visit if only for the pictorial schematics) is that the landmark structure may have predated all these men.** Brosse and Marigny, in this conception, may simply have worked various repairs upon it that became magnified in the retelling, while the gallows Remy set up might have been those on the secondary location, erected as a stopgap during a more thorough reconstruction of the permanent site, and/or reserved for more vulgar elements than ministers of the crown.

* Readers may appreciate an annotation of other references White makes in his fantasy classic.

** We find repeated claims that the alleged “sorceror” Marigny engaged for his capital crime was hanged below him, which would support that notion; I have been unable to identify the provenance of this detail, however.

On this date in 1763, a young woman shuffled off this mortal coil and into Quebecois folklore.

She’d made the mistake of outliving two husbands, and was convicted (with her father) of having been the instrument of their demise. Gibbeted after her death — a punishment not used in France, but Quebec had been captured by the English in the French and Indian War — her corpse became a figure of ghost stories and popular superstition, haunting passersby and playing poltergeist.

But why take it from me? Here’s the unhappy fate of Madame Corriveau, in puppet theater. (There’s also a compressed 12-minute version available.)

Devotees of the written word can get their fill in two 19th century texts available free from Google Books: a passage in Maple Leaves, and a historical novel in which she figures as a character, The Golden Dog. Her French Wikipedia page is here.

On this date in 1670, a 70-year-old upstanding Edinburgher went to the stake for confessing — unbidden — to witchcraft.

The “Wizard of West Bow” had had a distinguished military career and an exactingly pious public life among Edinburgh’s strictest Presbyterians. So it came as something of a surprise when, after being struck by an illness, he up and copped to a lifelong sexual relationship with his sister Jean … and a lifetime of hitherto unknown black arts, powered by a Satanic walking-staff. He was so far from being suspect that town elders at first thought him daft.

Only when Jean backed his story with the sort of details to give vapors to the “Bowhead Saints” neighborhood did things get serious. She especially warned about that staff.

So on this day, the dumbfounded city worthies had to tote one of their own to the area around Edinburgh’s modern Pilrig Street and have him strangled and burnt at the stake. Whatever moved Weir to issue his damning (literally!) admission, he was plainly quite in earnest: when asked to pray at the stake, he shot back, “Let me alone, I will not. I have lived as a beast, and I must die as a beast.” The staff was thrown onto the pyre with him; it was said to burn abnormally slowly.

His sister was hanged shortly thereafter for the same offenses, scandalizing her upstanding neighbors by tearing her clothes off on the way to the scaffold.

For a century, nobody dared live in Weir’s house, which the cremated major — and/or that staff, floating about looking for its owner — supposedly haunted. The house is long torn down, but the tale is natural fodder for any “haunted Edinburgh” tour.

One is struck in such a story by its modernity — perhaps the reason it could speak to a Victorian novelist like Robert Louis Stevenson.

The interpretive framework we begin with for witch hunts is — well, a “witch hunt.” Our own sense of what unjust social persecution is shapes the way we read these long-gone cases, the confessions forced from the victims’ lips. We identify with the “witches”; it is the alien world that ferrets them out and burns them that wants explaining.

Major Weir unnervingly turns the tables on such voyeurs as your correspondent. He steps without warning out of a forgotten mass of long-gone peoples, his confession not merely voluntary but insistent against skepticism — and suddenly we grapple for our bearings not in sociology but in abnormal psychology: here is a man very much of his society who has unexpectedly rejected it, boasts of rejecting it all along, and does so not craving after reconciliation to his people but in order to die (as does his sister) obstinate in that rejection. We can perhaps identify less readily with this individual than with his crestfallen friends.

Whether or not the Weirs really did anything that would count as a crime today — although one is practically forced to agree that at a minimum, the siblings violated a sexual taboo still enforced now — we have a template for this man not in the McCarthy hearings but straight from the evening news: the unassuming neighbor revealed to be a serial killer; the trusted rector who turns out to have been a pedophile.

On this date in 1680, Catherine Monvoisin was burned at the stake in the Place de Greve, a casualty of the “Poison Affair”.

The Poison Affair was rooted in a spate of (suspected) poisonings in France during the later part of the 17th Century. In 1670, the Duchasse d’Orleans, nee Princess Henrietta Anne Stuart the daughter of deposed and executed King Charles I of England, died suddenly. Some years before, the Duchasse, a great friend, and possibly lover, of her brother-in-law King Louis XIV, had convinced the king to exile her husband’s paramour, her rival for power. Although the results of an autopsy suggested that the duchasse died from an infection resulting from a perforated ulcer, popular opinion held that she had been poisoned by her husband’s exiled lover. Five years later, Marie-Madeleine-Marguerite d’Abray, Marquise de Brinvilliers, was executed for the murder of her father, brother and two sisters by poisoning (to gain control of their inheritances). These high-profiled murders, coupled with several other mysterious deaths at the time, heightened the aristocracy’s already considerable fear of poisoning.

In response to the aristocracy’s rising fear, Louis XIV instructed his chief of police to identify poisoners and neutralize the threat they posed. Accordingly, in 1679, a commission was established. The commission promptly began investigating, and arresting, fortune tellers, alchemists, and other purveyors of potions and powders. The police chief also re-established the Chambre Ardente (”burning court”) to try alleged witches and poisoners.

The most famous prisoner tried and convicted by the Chambre Ardente was Catherine Monvoisin. Known as La Voisin, she took up fortune telling, potion-making and midwifery when it became clear that her husband would not make a living in his chosen profession. Unlike her husband’s, her business thrived. Well-positioned women of the aristocracy flocked to her, seeking potions to secure the love of powerful men or to eliminate rivals (one such target of her craft was Louise de la Valliere, then-mistress of Louis XIV).

During the Poison Affair, La Voisin was named as a witch and a poisoner and sentenced to death. Before she died, however, she named many members of the aristocracy who had used her services. They clients she implicated included the king’s mistress Francoise-Athenais, the Marquise de Montespan, whom La Voisin said purchased aphrodisiacs and performed black masses with her to gain the king’s favor, and Francois Henri de Montmercy-Bouteville, the duc de Luxembourg. Although there was no evidence to corroborate La Voisin’s stories, her confession ruined the reputations of the people she named.

The Chambre Ardante was disbanded in 1682 under the weight of the growing scandal, as it began to involve more and more members of the aristocracy.

On this date in 1663,* a husband and wife were hanged for witchcraft in colonial Connecticut.

Salem, Mass. gets the publicity — and the tourism — but it was actually the Constitution State where the colonies’ first witch hangings took place, only a few years after the earliest European settlements were established.

As in the Old World, witch purges in New England took place episodically. It had been nearly a decade since any (documented) witchcraft execution when the witch-hunt erupted in Hartford that would claim this day’s victims.

The persecutions began with the deathbed ravings of an 8-year-old girl, who accused a certain Goodwife of the town, the latter preserving herself only by escaping detention and fleeing the colony with her husband.

A familiar cycle of indictments, denunciations, and extracted confessions ensued, as narrated by a 19th century historian.

The reasons for witch persecutions have been extensively and inconclusively debated. As the indispensable Walking the Berkshires blog observes, “Feuds, gossip, and a culture that demanded conformity to rigid social norms certainly played their part, but these secular explanations are easier for us moderns to accept than the sacred, and the two were inextricably linked in 17th-century New England.” It is achingly pitiable to suppose that when Rebecca Greensmith denounced her husband in her confession, she might have been in earnest:

I speak all of this out of love to my husband’s soul, and it is much against my will that I am now necessitate to speak against my husband. I desire that the Lord would open his heart to own and speak the truth.

Nathaniel Greensmith did not “own and speak the truth,” but he shared his wife’s fate this day. They may have been executed with a third accused witch as well, but the documentary trail for Mary Barnes’ case seems less certain. Though she, and perhaps another woman, may have been hanged after the Greensmiths in this particular spasm of supernatural paranoia, the Hartford witch trials of 1662-63 would mark the last witchcraft executions in Connecticut.

The Greensmiths left behind 15- and 17-year-old daughters, a modest estate, and community lore of the miraculous post-execution recovery of the party they were supposed to have been afflicting.

Noted colonial pietist Increase Mather would subsequently retail this latter point further to the fraying credibility of witch-hunting:

After the suspected Witches were either executed or fled, Ann Cole was restored to health, and has continued well for many years, approving her self a serious Christian.

…

The instance of the witch executed at Hartford, considering the circumstances of that confession, is as convictive a proof as most single examples that I have met with.

David Hall’s Witch-Hunting in Seventeen-Century New England reprints many of the original documentary fragments relating to the Connecticut witch trials, as does an acerbic century-old volume in the public domain, The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut, 1647-1697.

* Sometimes recorded as 1662 or 1662/3, since January 1 was not the legal beginning of the new year.

Update: A resolution officially clearing Connecticut’s “witches” is being mooted., thanks to the pressure of 8th- and 9th-generation descendants of one of the victims. The bill expired in committee in 2008, but could come up again in future sessions. (Thanks to Melisende for the story.)

On this date in 1594, Alison Balfour was burned as a witch on the strength of a confession extracted under the hideous torture of her family.

Balfour had been implicated in a plot — probably entirely fictitious — to poison the tyrannical young Earl of Orkney, with some misshapen blob of wax appearing as evidence of her communion with the infernal.

She was tortured, but she denied the charges.

Her 81-year-old husband was tortured in front of her, but she denied the charges.

Her son’s feet were crushed in front of her, but she denied the charges.

When at last her seven-year-old daughter was put to thumbscrews in front of her, she broke down and “confessed.”

Before her execution, she renounced her confession in heartbreaking words to be read in the original records:

sche … declarit and tuik upoun hir saull and conscience, as sche wald ansuer att the day of judgement … that sche wes als innocent and wald die als innocent on ony point of Wichcraft as ane barne new borne … the tyme of hir first Depositioun sche wes tortourit diverse and severall tymes in the Caschielawis, and sindrie tymis takin out of thame deid,* … as lykewyis hir guidman being in the stokis, hir sone tortourit in the Buitis, and hir dochtir put in the Pilliewinkis, quhairwith sche and thay wer swa vexit and tormentit, that pairtlie to eschew ane gretar torment and pwneischement, and upoun promeis of hir lyffe, and guid deid be the said Personne, falslie, aganis hir saull and conscience, sche maid that Confessioun, and na uthirwyis.

Just two years later, another supposed perpetrator of this same plot was acquitted in Edinburgh — the evidence of Balfour’s case thrown out as unreliably obtained under torture.

* “taken out of them dead” — i.e., unconscious

On an uncertain date in November of 1577, a popular medium whose given name is lost to history was burned to death in a lakeside town for claiming to speak with the dead.

The Soulmother of Kussnacht ran a successful enterprise channeling spirits for those who survived them. Though her persecution by a Church ill-disposed to “wise women” seems a given in retrospect, she evidently ran this business openly for well over a decade, and was at least once before brought to the attention of authorities who found her harmless.

Kussnacht as seen in an old postcard. Image reproduced with permission.

Historian Carlo Ginzburg locates Die Seelenmutter within the cosmos of pre-Christian “shamanism” that persisted in Christendom under varying degrees of toleration. In Ginzburg’s Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century, which chronicles the Inquisition’s crackdown on a sect of northern Italian occultists, the contemporaneous execution of the Soulmother is both barometer and precedent for Rome’s rising intolerance of heresy.