Archive for June, 2014
June 30th, 2014
Headsman
On this date in 1794, the Polish princess Rosalie Lubomirska was guillotined during the Paris Terror.
The hottest thing to come out of Chernobyl before 1986, the glamorous young Lubomirska had it all going for her before Europe turned revolutionary.
Her support for the reformist Patriotic Party in her homeland required her flight on to France when a Russian invasion defeated that movement in 1792. Indeed, short as her own thread was cut, Rosalie Lubomirska was only barely outlived by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth itself.
But escaping to her friend Marie Antoinette in France might not have been the savviest choice.
The irrepressible Melanie “Madame Guillotine” Clegane, author of such topical historical fiction as The Secret Diary of a Princess: A Novel of Marie Antoinette, has everything you need to know about Rosalie Lubomirska’s activities from that point in this post: going royalist after the execution of Louis XVI, taking Vendee rebels into her salon and/or bed, and seeing her lovers precede her to the guillotine while she desperately bought time by feigning pregnancy.
She left behind a young daughter. In much later years, this little girl grown up and married to noted Orientalist scholar Waclaw Seweryn Rzeuwski would manifest as a side character in a very different story: she is “Aunt Rozalia”, whose niece was Ewelina Hanska, the admirer turned wife of the novelist Honore de Balzac. Aunt Rozalia was a bitter foe of Ewelina’s declasse romance with the bourgeois scribbler and to judge by the correspondence of the lovers was continually trafficking in rumors that Balzac — who was in actuality a legendary workaholic — was a gambler, boozer, or suchlike dissipated wastrel.
Balzac gave his antagonist the gift of literary immortality by using her as an inspiration (one inspiration: his own mother was another) for the titular killjoy spinster in his novel Cousin Bette.
On this day..
Entry Filed under: 18th Century,Beheaded,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Execution,France,Guillotine,History,Nobility,Public Executions,Women
Tags: 1790s, 1794, balzac, French Revolution, honore de balzac, june 30, paris, rosalie lubomirska
June 29th, 2014
Headsman
On this date in 1612, the Scottish noble Robert Crichton, Lord Crichton of Sanquhar, swung for revenge served very cold.
Sanquhar (alternatively, Sanquire) was a Scottish noble imported to the English court in the train of King James. Keeping up his swordsmanship in a practice bout with the fencing-master John Turner, Sanquhar had his eye put out by his opponent’s foil.
While this injury was the source of the tragedy that ensued for both men, it is said — perhaps it’s just literary license — that it was the illustrious French king Henri IV who turned the situation deadly with a passing remark when Sanquhar subsequently visited Henri’s duel-mad realm to the effect that it was a wonder that the author of such a horrible wound still lived. Already down one organ for his trouble, Sanquhar was stung to discover emasculation stacked on his woes; even though it was several years after* the duel, Sanquhar began plotting to vindicate eye and honor alike.
If this is so, it is not altogether clear to us that hiring a dependent to shoot the offending duellist unawares in a tavern quite comports with an offended dignity, but that’s chivalry for you. (Actually, the fact that Turner was not himself a gentleman made it socially problematic for Sanquhar to engage him in a proper affair of honor, per the queer codex of early modern masculinity.)
His Lordship had leaned on at least three underlings while engineering his belated revenge, and one of these wisely turned crown’s evidence against the rest of the quartet and hung the lot of his confederates. The headline case was of course the prosecution of the Baron Sanquhar handled personally by the king’s Solicitor-General, one Francis Bacon.
At trial on June 27 — 47 days after the murder; two days before the execution — Sanquhar mounted a better defense for his honor than for his neck.
After this loss of my eye and with the great hazard of the loss of life, I must confess that I ever kept a grudge of my soul against Turner, but had no purpose to take so high a revenge; yet in the course of my revenge I considered not my wrongs upon terms of Christianity — for then I should have sought for other satisfaction — but, being trained up in the courts of princes and in arms, I stood upon the terms of honour, and thence befell this act of dishonour, whereby I have offended — first, God; second, my prince; third, my native country; fourth, this country; fifth, the party murdered; sixth, his wife; seventh, posterity; eighth, Carlisle, now to be executed;** and lastly, ninth, my own soul, and I am now to die for my offence.
But, my lords, besides my own offence, which in its nature needs no aggravation, divers scandalous reports are given out which blemish my reputation, which is more dear to me than my life: first, that I made show of reconciliation with Turner, the which, I protest, is utterly untrue, for what I have formerly said I do again assure your good lordships, that ever after my hurt received I kept a grudge in my soul against him, and never made the least pretence of reconciliation with him. Yet this, my lords, I will say, that if he would have confessed and sworn he did it not of purpose, and withal would have foresworn arms, I would have pardoned him; for, my lords, I considered that it must be done either of set purpose or ignorantly. If the first, I had no occasion to pardon him; if the last, that is no excuse in a master, and therefore for revenge of such a wrong I thought him unworthy to bear arms.
Shorter Lord Sanquhar: I confess.
Needing not so much to contest the case at the bar as to narrate its intended moral, Bacon speculated that Sanquhar must have come by his egregious “affections of dwelling in malice, rather out of Italy … than out of any part of this island, England, or Scotland.” While this murder was not a duel, it sprang from a palpably similar place — and duels, just then taking on their recognizable ritual form, were furiously opposed by the state. Sanquhar had resided in Italy, but more than that, the term was code for the fencing experts who brought from the continent codes duello and mannerly rapiers and the prospect of destructive private vendettas. This was more than premeditated homicide; it was an arrogation of the king’s own prerogatives of justice and order.
“What the law abhorred was not cold-blooded premeditated duelling as such, but the attitudes manifested by that practice,” writes Jeremy Horder.† “The calculating duellist is an ‘isolent’ person acting with ‘arrogancy and rebellion’ in casting off the yoke of obedience, as if he had the power to set his own laws above those of the common law.”
Angling for a promotion to Attorney General (he would get it in 1613), Bacon also made a point to lavish praise on his Scotch-born sovereign for another lesson the trial was meant to underscore to his English subjects: “his majesty hath shewed himself God’s true lieutenant, and that he is no respecter of persons; but the English, Scottish, nobleman, fencer, are to him alike in respect of justice.”
Nobleman and subalterns alike died on different gallows this date: Lord Crichton of Sanquhar hanged before Westminster Hall, while his two assassin-henchmen dangled on gallows at Fleet Street.
* Sources propose various dates from 1604 to 1607 for the eye-foiling; Bacon in arraigning Sanquhar remarks that “it is now five years” since that happened.
** The man who actually shot John Turner.
† “The Duel and the English Law of Homicide,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Autumn 1992.
On this day..
Entry Filed under: 17th Century,Capital Punishment,Crime,Death Penalty,England,Execution,Hanged,History,Murder,Nobility,Notable Participants,Public Executions
Tags: 1610s, 1612, duelling, francis bacon, henri iv, james vi and i, june 29, london, robert crichton
June 28th, 2014
Headsman
On this date in 1927,* the Bohemian playboy Jindrich Bažant was hanged at Kutna Hora for a murder spree directed at his several lovers.
Thanks to wealthy parents, Bazant‘s major occupation was the pleasures of the flesh.
But really, “I was destined to be a murderer,” he confessed upon arrest. He’d certainly thrown himself into the role once he tired of his girlfriends.
Two women who fancied themselves future Mrs. Bazants were the victims: Marie Safarikova, age 19, lured into a supposed elopement to Slovakia and then coldly shot dead in the woods; and Josefa Pavelkova, who was already pregnant with Bazant’s child.
Yet another lover, Bozena Rihova, almost met the same fate after she threatened Bazant with a criminal complaint for infecting her with a venereal disease. Bazant shot her, bludgeoned her with a hammer, and set her on fire — but Rihova miraculously survived to testify against her former paramour.
Bazant was among the last put to death by Leopold Wohlschlager, one of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s five state executioners at the time of its dissolution. Wohlschlager got started in the craft at the tender age of 15, and was well into his seventies when he hanged Bazant.
* I’m going with the plurality (and the best-detailed) of Czech-language articles here, against some cites for the same date in 1926.
On this day..
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Czechoslovakia,Death Penalty,Execution,Hanged,Murder,Sex
Tags: 1920s, 1927, jindrich bazant, june 28, kutna hora
June 27th, 2014
Headsman
On this date in 1622, the swashbuckling Ruthenian nobleman Samuel Korecki was strangled by the Ottomans.
Korecki English Wikipedia entry | Polish) was a szlachcic of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at that empire’s early 17th century peak.
Korecki’s clan hung its zupans at Korets, in present-day western Ukraine, and the young Samuel fought gleefully in the early 1600s in the train of the legendary commander Stanislaw Zolkiewski when the Polish army was ravaging Russia.
Samuel Korecki married the daughter of Jeremi(ah) Mohila or Movila, a boyar who contended for the Moldavian at the turn of the century; it was by this link that he too became drawn into the politics of that frontier realm, along with several other powerful families of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This period is known as the Moldavian Magnate Wars.
Though a dependency of the Ottomans, Moldavia had proven appealing in the past for Polish adventurers. The late Mohila had bequeathed power in Moldavia to his son Constantine but after some years Constantine’s tributary payments to Istanbul started to lag. His resulting deposition by the sultan saw Constantine flee to Polish territory — and his brother-in-law Korecki come to his aid by mounting an armed expedition meant to depose the Ottoman replacement.*
Korecki was captured by the Turks in the process, dramatically escaped via Greece and Italy (and a celebrity-making papal audience into the bargain), then returned to the field only to be captured again at the Battle of Cecora in 1620.
This decisive Ottoman victory portended ill and not just for Korecki personally.
19th century woodcut illustrating the death of Samuel Korecki. (Source)As our man was hauled back to Istanbul (he would not escape a second time), the rampant Turks drove for Ukraine with the intention of taking a bite out of it for the Sublime Porte.
The Poles were able to stanch the advance with a stand at Khotyn, but the Commonwealth would shift into an unmistakable decline thereafter; by mid-century, rebellious Cossacks had taken Ukraine over to Russian protection, while Swedish incursions from the north so greatly reduced Poland’s reach that the period is known as the Deluge. (For his part, the teenage Ottoman sultan Osman II went home from this campaign determined to reform the Janissary corps whom he blamed for the unsatisfying stalemate of Khotyn; these dangerous slave-soldiers vetoed the plan by murdering Osman instead.)
* Moldavia was a secondary foreign policy concern for the Ottomans, who were absorbed in this period by war with Persia.
On this day..
Entry Filed under: 17th Century,Execution,History,Nobility,Ottoman Empire,Poland,Power,Soldiers,Strangled,Ukraine
Tags: 1620s, 1622, battle of cecora, istanbul, june 27, moldavian magnate wars, osman ii, samuel korecki
June 26th, 2014
Headsman
Japan is in the news this morning for the surprise hanging of 68-year-old Masanori Kawasaki.
Kawasaki stabbed to death his sister-in-law Keiko Miura and her two granddaughters in 2007.
“It was an extremely cruel case,” Justice Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki said in announcing the execution.
Nevertheless, every execution no matter the circumstances of the crime draws controversy in Japan, which only hangs a handful of inmates in a typical year* and many of them only after very long waits. (At under seven years from stab to rope, Kawasaki’s was very fast by Japanese standards.)
Japan’s death penalty is distinguished — apart from the very fact of its existence, which makes it the only G8 country besides the United States to boast an active death chamber — by hangings conducted without prior announcement. Once a prisoner’s final appeals are turned down (Kawasaki’s were rejected in 2012) he can essentially be executed at any time the Justice Minister signs off, and have no more warning than the hour it takes to dash off final letters and final prayers. The condemned must acclimate day by day to the continual haunts of a capricious death that might snatch them at any moment.
Amnesty International can’t be far from the mark in the response issued by its East Asia Research Director to Kawasaki’s hanging: “Death row inmates live under the constant fear of execution, never knowing from one day or the next if they are going to be put to death. This is adds psychological torture to an already cruel and inhumane punishment.”
Another Japanese death row inmate, Shigeo Okazaki, also died this June 26 of 2014. He suffered respiratory failure.
* Kawasaki’s was the first hanging of 2014.
On this day..
Entry Filed under: 21st Century,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Execution,Hanged,Japan,Murder,Ripped from the Headlines
Tags: 2010s, 2014, june 26, literally executed today, masanori kawasaki, sadakazu tanigaki
June 25th, 2014
Meaghan
(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)
On this date in 1646, a black slave named Jan Creoli was executed in Manhattan, part of what was then called New Netherland and is now New York.
Creoli had been caught having carnal knowledge of a ten-year-old boy, another slave named Manuel Congo. Several of his own fellow Africans turned him in to the authorities. When Manuel Congo was brought face-to-face with Creoli, the boy “without being threatened in any way confessed to the deed in the presence of the prisoner.”
In her book Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America, 1580-1660, author Cynthia J. Van Zandt notes,
The statement that a ten-year-old child who had been raped might “confess to the deed” seems startling to modern eyes, but it is highly significant for understanding Dutch authorities’ actions. As far as New Netherland’s officials were concerned, Manuel Congo was not just a victim but also a participant in the crime of sodomy despite his age and the fact that he had been raped. Dutch officials in New Netherland and in the United Provinces regarded sodomy as one of the worst social crimes possible, every bit as serious as murder.
Confronted with his victim’s testimony, Creoli admitted his guilt and shamefacedly added that he’d also committed sodomy while in the Dutch Caribbean colony of Curacao.
He was accordingly executed: tied to stake, garrotted, and his body burned to ashes. Little Manuel got off lightly: he was only whipped.
On this day..
- 1950: The Martyred, at the outset of the Korean War - 2020
- 1999: Eduardo Agbayani, omnishambles execution - 2019
- 1942: Gordon Cummins, the Blackout Ripper - 2018
- 1880: Three juvenile offenders in Canton, Ohio - 2017
- 1942: Evzen Rosicky, athlete - 2016
- 1483: Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers - 2015
- 2003: He Xiuling, Ma Qingxui, Li Juhua and Dai Donggui - 2013
- 10 executions that defined the 1980s - 2012
- 1804: Georges Cadoudal, Chouan - 2012
- 1790: Thomas Bird, the first federal execution under the U.S. constitution - 2011
- 1591: Euphane MacCalzean, witch - 2010
- 1579: Hatano Hideharu, en route to the Tokugawa Shogunate - 2009
- 1959: Charles Starkweather, Nebraska spree killer - 2008
Entry Filed under: 17th Century,Burned,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Disfavored Minorities,Execution,Guest Writers,History,Netherlands,New York,Occupation and Colonialism,Other Voices,Public Executions,Racial and Ethnic Minorities,Rape,Sex,Slaves,USA
Tags: 1640s, 1646, jan creoli, june 25, sodomy
June 24th, 2014
Headsman
On this date in 1340, the English and French fought an early naval engagement of the Hundred Years’ War: the Battle of Sluys.
The English won the battle … and the French admiral wound up hanging from a mast.
At the outset of the Hundred Years’ War in 1337, the French bossed the Channel and inflicted devastating sea raids on the English coast. In the long war’s first major battle at sea, a French fleet in September 1338 overwhelmed an English flotilla carrying valuable English wool to the Low Countries.
Nicholas Behuchet, one of the French commanders at this earlier battle, did not hesitate to massacre his prisoners.
Thus conquering did these said mariners of the king of France in this winter take great pillage, and especially they conquered the handsome great nef called the Christophe, all charged with the goods and wool that the English were sending to Flanders, which nef had cost the English king much to build: but its crew were lost to these Normans, and were put to death.
England’s allies were in the Low Countries, so too many battles like this stood to strangle the English cause in the crib. For near two years, French privateers had leave to ravage the English coast, while French troops overran Flanders and made the English Queen Philippa* hostage.
Seeking a breakout, King Edward III requisitioned English merchant cogs — there was no standing navy at the time — into a fleet of perhaps 160 or 200 vessels, heavy with soldiers to invade Flanders.
On June 24, two days after setting out from the Orwell estuary at Ipswich, Edward’s armada boldly fell upon a larger French fleet anchored at the Flanders port of Sluys.
The medieval chronicler Froissart’s account makes for riveting reading.** This was no stately ballet of seamanship but a gory close-quarters melee: as was characteristic for the time, the “sea” battle was mostly just about coming together for the respective fleets’ marines to board one another’s ships and murder anyone on board who wasn’t worth a ransom. The French admiral Behuchet lashed his ships together across the mouth of the harbor, a sort of floating breastwork that would enable the French soldiery to shimmy up and down the entire line no matter where the English focused their attack.
To the sound of “scores of trumpets, horns and other instruments,”
Fierce fighting broke out on every side, archers and crossbowmen shooting arrows and bolts at each other pell-mell, and men-at-arms struggling and striking in hand-to-hand combat. In order to come to closer quarters, they had great iron grappling-hooks fixed to chains, and these they hurled into each others’ ships to draw them together and hold them fast while the men engaged. Many deadly blows were struck and gallant deeds performed, ships and men were battered, captured and recaptured. The great ship Christopher [a large English cog previously captured by the French and situated in the French front row -ed.] was recovered by the English at the beginning of the battle and all those on board were killed or taken prisoner …
An illustration of the Battle of Sluys from Froissart’s chronicle. Note the mast of the ship at far left: it displays the English arms quartered with the French, Edward III’s heraldic assertion of sovereignty over both realms.It was indeed a bloody and murderous battle. Sea-fights are always fiercer than fights on land, because retreat and flight are impossible. Every man is obliged to hazard his life and hope for success, relying on his own personal bravery and skill … [it] rage[d] furiously from early morning until afternoon, during which time there were many notable feats of arms and the English were hard put to it to hold their own, since they were opposed by hardened soldiers and seamen, who outnumbered them by four to one.
Edward III took an arrow or crossbow bolt to the leg — great-man historical legend has it that it was fired by Nicholas Behuchet himself — but captained his flotilla to an overwhelming victory, capturing most of the French ships and destroying the French, their Genoese allies, “and all who were with them … [they were] killed or drowned, not a single one escaping in the general slaughter.” Poetic license aside, it was a spectacular triumph for the English — and a crushing defeat for the French.†
In the 1596 play Edward III, which might have been co-written by Shakespeare, imagined the scene in the report of an escaped mariner:
Purple the sea, whose channel filled as fast
With streaming gore that from the maimed fell
As did the gushing moisture break into
The crannied cleftures of the through-shot planks.
Here flew a head dissevered from the trunk,
There mangled arms and legs were tossed aloft
As when a whirlwind takes the summer dust
And scatters it in middle of the air.
Then might ye see the reeling vessels split
And tottering sink into the ruthless flood,
Until their lofty tops were seen no more.
Let it not be said that in this instance the commander escaped the consequences of his folly. Behuchet, who insisted against advice on lashing the boats together and thereby sacrificed all maneuverability, didn’t have much room for maneuver himself when the victorious English hanged him at battle’s end from the mast of his own ship.
* Seen elsewhere in these pages successfully begging her husband’s pardon of the famed Six Burghers of Calais later in the war. Philippa was a homegrown native of the Low Countries, and her marriage to Edward III reflects the alliance between their respective regions.
** For a snappy modern gloss on the battle, check this excerpt of Dan Jones’s The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England.
† It is said that no courtier dared give King Philip VI of France the horrifying news until a jester availing his station’s license for cheek informed him that “Our knights are much braver than the English.” Asked why, the fool replied, “The English do not dare jump into the sea in full armour.”
On this day..
Entry Filed under: 14th Century,Arts and Literature,At Sea,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,England,Execution,France,Hanged,History,Lawyers,No Formal Charge,Politicians,Power,Soldiers,Summary Executions,Wartime Executions
Tags: 1340, 1340s, battle of sluys, edward iii, hundred years war, june 24, nicholas behuchet, philip vi, shakespeare, william shakespeare
June 23rd, 2014
Headsman
At dawn this date in 1977, child murderer Jerome Carrein was guillotined in the courtyard of Douai prison. He was the second-last person executed in France’s history.*
He was a vagabond ex-convict who slept most nights in the slough of rural Arleux, cadging food enough off relatives and a pitying local barkeep.
It was a more bestial appetite that saw him into the guillotine’s annals: on October 27, he pursuaded an eight-year-old schoolgirl, the daughter of his benefactor publican, to come along with him. Once he had her in the swamps, Carrein attempted to ravish little Cathy Petit. As Cathy struggled, Carrein later explained — he confessed almost immediately — “I saw red. I felt lost in the idea that she would denounce me, so I threw her in the pond.”
Her drowned corpse was discovered the next day.
The growing reluctance of the French state to slice off heads in the 1970s did not express itself in interminable wait times on death row. Carrein was condemned to death on July 12, 1976, during the run-up to Christian Ranucci‘s execution for a similar abduction/child murder.
That conviction was vacated a few months later for a trial irregularity, but the retrial took place in the wake of another high-profile trial: anti-death penalty crusader Robert Badinter had successfully defended a man named Patrick Henry from the guillotine in yet another nationally known child murder case, winning a life sentence instead. There was no small public outcry over this outcome, and Carrein’s prosecutor explicitly called on the jury in his second case to avenge with severity to Carrein the “rape of public conscience” perpetrated by leniency to Henry. (London Times, June 24, 1977)
Pierre Lefrance, speaking for Carrein’s defense, ventured his own appeal to the jurors’ wider sensibilities — in this case, of the growing likelihood that capital punishment was nearing the end of the line in France: “Were the death penalty to be abolished at last in the next year or two, would you wish that Carrein was the last man guillotined in France?”
The invaluable French-language guillotine.cultureforum.net has a forum thread on this case; be sure to note the appearance on page 3 of a poster claiming to be the daughter of Jerome Carrein’s first wife.
* It was also the first execution of France’s last official chief executioner, Marcel Chevalier.
On this day..
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Beheaded,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Execution,France,Guillotine,History,Murder,Rape,Sex
Tags: 1970s, 1977, arleux, cathy petit, christian ranucci, douai, jerome carrein, june 23, marcel chevalier, patrick henry, robert badinter
June 22nd, 2014
Headsman
A Venetian rebel was beheaded on this date in 1310.
Our grim tale actually tacks back to an altogether different death: the sudden January 31, 1308 demise of Azzo VIII d’Este, lord of Venice’s neighbor Ferrara.*
The resulting power vacuum saw Venice under the Doge Pietro Gradenigo tangle for influence in Ferrara with the Papal States of Pope Clement V.
This controversial intervention briefly put a Venetian puppet ruler in charge of Ferrara, but it also led Clement to excommunicate Gradenigo and place La Serenissima under a papal interdict.
The moral force which the condition of society lent to such a measure was immense … It paralyzed trade; it dried up the sources of industrial wealth; it laid a country under every civil and religiou disability; it shed over society an atmosphere of gloom; it affected every relation of life … At home it fomented agitation, gave colour and pretext to the worst motives, and evoked all the latent distempers of the public mind. Abroad, it legitimized rebellion, imparted to moribund antipathies a new vitality, and transformed wavering allies into open enemies. (From History of the Venetian Republic, vol. II, whose detailed narrative of the events relevant to this post continues in Volume III)
Clement also had more temporal weapons to fight with, and he used them to ruthless effect.
In August 1309, papal troops overran the Venetian garrison at the Ferrara fortress of Tedaldo and handled the prisoners like they had the Dolcinians, choking the Po with Venetian corpses.
Conditions were ripe for some disturbances in La Serenissima. The Ferrara thing was a complete debacle, and not only was the same guy still in charge, but his previous foreign policy resume basically consisted of being repeatedly outmaneuvered by Genoa.
Hotheads of three leading families of the Venetian opposition who had vainly counseled neutrality in the Ferrara affair, the Quirini, the Badoer, and the Tieopolo, embarked an audacious plot to mount a coup d’etat toppling the Doge and the whole Ground Council of noblemen by whom he ruled. The conspirators were to act on the morning of June 15 — but hours before that, a vacillating confederate had betrayed them. As a result, when the ferocious Marco Quirini arrived at the Piazza San Marco that morning with his men-at-arms, the Doge had a surprise force waiting to rout him under a furious downpour.
Quirini at least had the honor of dying in hopeless battle for his cause. His son-in-law and co-conspirator Bajamonte Tiepolo, who was to arrive at the same square via the Mercerie, dithered and showed up only when Quirini was already defeated and dead. Legend has it that a woman named Giustina Rosso killed Tiepolo’s standard-bearer dead by hurling (or just accidentally dropping) a mortar upon the rebels as they advanced up the street. (Present-day tourists traversing this upscale shopping street can catch a small bas-relief commemorating this character near the clock tower where the Mercerie opens onto St. Mark’s.)
Tiepolo belatedly charged the square, and was like Quirini repulsed; however, he was able to fall back across the Grand Canal, cutting the bridge against his pursuers, and holed up in a makeshift fortress hoping for reinforcements from the last-arriving of their fellows, Badoer Badoer.
The latter, however, was intercepted on his way to reinforcing the revolutionaries’ position and taken prisoner, which defeat of his hopes led Tiepolo and Doge alike to prefer a negotiated surrender to the charnel house that would have resulted from storming the redoubt. His followers were amnestied and Tiepolo himself sent into exile.
But Badoer Badoer was not covered by this deal. The Council he had proposed to overturn instead tried him for treason, and voted his condemnation on June 22 — a sentence put into immediate effect.
The exiled Tiepolo’s home was razed to the ground and replaced with a column eternally damning his memory:
This land belonged to Bajamonte
And now, for his iniquitous betrayal,
This has been placed to frighten others
And to show these words to everyone forever.
That column today has been removed to a museum — evidently one needs special permission to find it — but a worn stone outside a souvenir shop labeled “Loc. Col. Bai. The. MCCCX” marks the spot where it stood for four centuries.
The plot’s other legacy to Venice was the Council of Ten, a sort of inner secretariat of the Grand Council. Introduced in July 1310 as an emergency measure, the Ten soon became a permanent feature of the state, and an increasingly powerful one into the 17th century. The “temporary” council ended up lasting until the Napoleon finally toppled a by-then tottering Venetian Republic in 1797.
* In the Inferno, Dante accuses Azzo of assassinating his father.
On this day..
- 1918: Captain Alexey Schastny - 2020
- 1568: Weyn Ockers, slipper slinger - 2019
- 1894: William Whaley, "the horror of the situation" - 2018
- 1936: Edward Cornelius, vicarage murderer - 2017
- 1940: Three saboteurs and a spy, "Fusilles et oublies" - 2016
- 1906: Richard Ivens, hypnotized? - 2015
- 1934: William Cody Kelley, the first in Colorado's gas chamber - 2013
- 1627: Francois de Montmorency and his second, for dueling - 2012
- 1535: Cardinal John Fisher - 2011
- 1669: Roux de Marsilly, employer of the Man in the Iron Mask? - 2010
- 1920: Dennis Gunn, hanged by a fingerprint - 2009
- 1711: Ifranj Ahmad, Janissary - 2008
Entry Filed under: 14th Century,Beheaded,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Execution,History,Italy,Nobility,Politicians,Power,Revolutionaries,Treason,Venice
Tags: 1310, 1310s, june 22
June 21st, 2014
Headsman
The novel East German polity was coming in the late 1950s to a crossroads that saw security paranoia ratchet up dramatically.
Emigration to West Germany accelerated considerably as the 1960s began, eventually giving rise to the infamous Berlin Wall.
In the countryside, forced collectivization implemented in 1960 produced resistance all its own. Agricultural output plummeted (the knock-on effects of a 1959 drought helped too); according to Patrick Major’s Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power, groceries and everyday household items became markedly more difficult to procure in the early 1960s, sapping productivity throughout the economy as city workers queued for hours and black-market exchanges proliferated.
Following the Soviet Union’s great tradition of attributing economic trouble to running-dog wreckers, East Germany introduced the death penalty for politically motivated economic sabotage* — for example, the 206 cases of arson it attributed among 862 rural fires in 1960. (Figures as per Major.)
Our figure today, Gottfried Strympe, fell foul of these laws. In reality, he was no cackling secret agent but a disturbed loner.
He lurked about the eastern city of Bautzen opportunistically by turns the petty thief or the peeping tom.
Unfortunately for Strympe, who did some spells in psychiatric wards, his deviance extended past the titillation of spying a Hausfrau in her bustier to the much more menacing diversions of pyromania.
The poor man needed a social worker; what he got was the executioner. The charge sheet dramatically attributed his 28 acts of arson (crimes that each caused only minor property damage, and no human casualties) to the inspiration of “West German and American imperialists.”
Strympe, you see, had often visited a father (deceased in 1958) in West Berlin, back before the Wall sealed that city. Of course on those trips, Strympe picked over a Whitman’s sampler of western decadences, from pornography to Social Democracy. On this basis, the Stasi attributed his incendiarism to “terrorism” rooted in “an antisocial attitude strengthened by his stays in West Berlin.”
Strympe had a public show trial, the better that “the population of Bautzen will recognize the danger of communication and travel to West Berlin” (with props of said population — workers’ and civic groups — obligingly supplying the requisite demands for the traitor’s execution).
He was beheaded by Fallbeil at Leipzig on June 21, 1962.
* See Politische Strafjustiz in der Ära Ulbricht: Vom bekennenden Terror zur verdeckten Repression by Falco Werkentin.
On this day..
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Arson,Beheaded,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Diminished Capacity,East Germany,Execution,Germany,Guillotine,History,Treason
Tags: 1960s, 1962, bautzen, cold war, communism, gottfried strympe, june 21, mental illness, terrorism
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