A History of Murder

Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present

Pieter Spierenburg

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745643786, 9780745643779
• eBook ISBN: 9780745658636
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa medievale

This book offers a fascinating and insightful overview of seven centuries of murder in Europe. It tells the story of the changing face of violence and documents the long-term decline in the incidence of homicide. From medieval vendettas to stylised duels, from the crime passionel of the modern period right up to recent public anxieties about serial killings and underworld assassinations, the book offers a richly illustrated account of murder's metamorphoses.

In this original and compelling contribution, Spierenburg sheds new light on several important themes. He looks, for example, at the transformation of homicide from a private matter, followed by revenge or reconciliation, into a public crime, always subject to state intervention. Combining statistical data with a cultural approach, he demonstrates the crucial role gender played in the spiritualisation of male honour and the subsequent reduction of male-on-male aggression, as well as offering a comparative view of how different social classes practised and reacted to violence.

This authoritative study will be of great value to students and scholars of the history of crime and violence, criminology and the sociology of violence. At a time when murder rates are rising and public fears about violent crime are escalating, this book will also interest the general reader intrigued by how our relationship with murder reached this point.

1

Romeo’s Kindred: The Fragility of Life in Medieval Europe

Juliet Capulet and Romeo Montague promise to be true to each other for better or for worse, in secret, with only a friendly friar present. A little later, the young bridegroom and some of his kinsmen, on a walk through town, encounter a party of their enemies. One of them, Tybalt, hurls an insult at Romeo. The power of love stops him from immediate retaliation, but his companion Mercutio draws his sword. Exclaiming that the Prince of Verona wants peace in the city, Romeo intervenes in the fight to stop it, but too late. Mercutio is seriously injured. Then Romeo deplores his own cowardliness:

. . . O sweet Juliet

Thy beauty hath made me effeminate

And in my temper soften’d valour’s steel.¹

A little later Romeo learns that Mercutio has died. When Tybalt returns, Romeo has recovered his manliness and challenges the killer: one of them has to die too. This time, Tybalt does not survive the fight. Romeo runs away to a hiding place, but he leaves it during the night to spend a few happy hours with his lovely bride before his fleeing for good. He bids farewell to Juliet as the lark announces the morning: “I must be gone and live, or stay and die.”

Ignorant of the clandestine union, the Capulet family arranges for their daughter’s wedding to the young nobleman, Paris. Juliet turns to the friar for help. Not daring to admit that he has already married her to Romeo and afraid that he will have to preside over a bigamous ceremony, the friar makes a plan. He has a mysterious potion, which will make Juliet appear dead for two days. She is indeed buried in the family vault, not in a coffin but dressed in her finest clothes. Then fate strikes. The messenger whom the friar has sent to Mantova to inform Romeo of the ruse, so that he can snatch away the sleeping Juliet, is held up because of a plague rumor. From another acquaintance, Romeo hears that his loved one has suddenly died. With poison procured in Mantova, he rides back to Verona; he breaks open the vault and through the dim light sees Juliet’s body:

. . . O my love! my wife!

Death, that hath suck’d the honey of thy breath,

Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty . . .

Then he swallows the poison:

Here’s to my love! O true apothecary!

Thy drugs are quick. – Thus with a kiss I die.

Immediately after this, Juliet wakes up from her long sleep and notices her dead husband:

What’s here? a cup, clos’d in my true love’s hand?

Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end: –

O churl! drink all, and left no friendly drop

To help me after? – I will kiss thy lips;

Haply some poison yet doth hang on them,

But there is not enough poison left on Romeo’s lips and when Juliet hears watchmen approaching, she quickly grabs his dagger and stabs herself. Soon all the principal characters assemble around the two lifeless bodies. United in sorrow, Capulet and Montague make peace. The Prince concludes: “For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

These events, purported to have happened in the northern Italian town of Verona at the beginning of the fourteenth century, are rendered here as retold by the English playwright William Shakespeare (1564–1616). Obviously, they are not plain history. The admiration of posterity, not the judgment of modern scholars, ought to be invoked to plead the case for Romeo and Juliet. The young couple has fascinated audiences since the sixteenth century, through the Romantic age, until today. Actors, directors, and writers of new versions have interpreted the motif, which has changed with every generation that considered it afresh. West Side Story, the popular musical and film of some 50 years ago, is the best-known modern interpretation. Romeo and Juliet, then, are characters who constantly appear to us in a new guise. It would be utterly superfluous to issue the stern caveat of a professional historian, warning that this play does not accurately depict fourteenth-century Verona, or, indeed, late medieval Italy. This chapter reintroduces the legendary couple because of the family enmities that tragically thwarted their brief romance. That part of the story, whatever its fictional content, alerts us to events and situations which really took place, in Italy and elsewhere.²

That the story migrated from one society to another is actually an advantage. A consideration of Shakespeare’s sources makes that clear. He wrote the play in the early 1590s, when English versions of the legend were already available. The English, along with French and Spanish writers, had adapted the tale from a novel by Luigi da Porto (1485–1529).³ This nobleman from Vicenza had situated the tragic love of Giulietta and Romeo in the city of Verona at the time of Bartolomeo della Scala’s rule (1301–4). Based on an ambiguous stanza in Dante’s Divina Commedia, da Porto had assumed that the Montecchi and Cappelletti were Veronese families enmeshed in a feud.⁴ This author, however, although he significantly reworked the theme, had not invented it. The original source, until literary historians discover a still earlier version, is Masuccio Salernitano’s Il Novellino, written in the 1450s. Masuccio (1410–75), whose real name was Tommaso Guardati, worked at the court of the Aragonese kings of Naples. His Novellino is a collection of short stories, one of which tells about the secret love of Mariotto and Ganozza. According to Masuccio, this affair took place “not long ago” and, more important, in Siena. Mariotto Mignanelli is “a youth of a good family” and Ganozza, whose surname is not mentioned, the daughter of an esteemed citizen. The motifs of clandestine wedding, exile because of homicide, the sleeping potion, and the lovers’ deaths are all there, although Mariotto does not commit suicide but is decapitated at the court’s order.⁵ Surprisingly, however, the Sienese story by Masuccio has no rival families. Mariotto simply gets into an argument with “another honorable citizen,” and this escalates into a fight; the citizen is hit on the head with a stick and dies. This was a homicide for honor, no doubt, but without, apparently, a family feud.

The Sienese and Neapolitan origins of the story of Romeo and Juliet serve as a warning. Not every medieval homicide can be traced back to a vendetta. Spontaneous street brawls, spousal conflicts, and violent robberies also occurred, as they would in subsequent periods of European history. And yet, a consideration of later periods makes the vendetta a crucial phenomenon. Every other type of serious violence which can be observed in the Middle Ages was equally characteristic of the early modern era, or even beyond. If we wonder what really was specific about the violence of the period that ended around the middle of the sixteenth century, it is precisely the omnipresence of feuds – feuds between rival families, competing factions, neighboring lords and their retainers, members of opposed camps in a military conflict, or between two groups that had close internal bonds for still other reasons. In the words of a distinguished French historian: “The vendetta made its imprint on every aspect of medieval life, in particular in the towns and that until the fifteenth century at least.”⁶

Thus, despite the absence of rival families from Masuccio’s tale, Siena had its share of bloody feuds. By the mid-fourteenth century, the Tolomei and Salimbeni families were enemies, as were the Malavolti and Piccolomini families. As a prominent historian of Siena explained four decades ago: “To expand upon the numerous episodes involving members of powerful noble families would belabor the obvious. Published chronicles alone are replete with tales of their murders, assaults and minor battles.”⁷ Middle Ages, in this chapter, stands for the period from about 1300 to the mid-sixteenth century, when it is more or less possible to distinguish between interpersonal and state violence, although state institutions were only just nascent. They nevertheless ensured a measure of regulation of violence, but this was no more than rudimentary and was easily circumvented.

Murder and the Medieval City

The prevalence of feuding was a major factor contributing to the elevated homicide rates found in the Middle Ages. They leave us in no doubt that violence was endemic in Europe. Surprisingly, however, the oldest reliable figures, for thirteenth-century England, are relatively modest – though not really low – compared to those available for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. James Given compiled the thirteenth-century rates from eyre rolls (accounts of visitations by justice officials) supplemented with coroner’s records – sources which include cases with unknown offenders. The averages, over periods of three or four years, for the counties of Bedford, Kent, Norfolk, Oxford, and Warwick lay between 9 and 25 per 100,000 inhabitants, depending on the population estimate. For the cities of London and Bristol it was, respectively, 12 and as low as 4, but these urban figures refer to just two years in each case. Note, moreover, that the counties and towns studied are concentrated in the relatively small core area of southern England. Given does concede that Wales and Scotland were notorious feuding areas, but it is possible that the rest of England, too, was more violent than the region he investigated.⁸ In any case, higher figures have been calculated for fourteenth-century England. In London, between 1300 and 1340, the average was 42 per 100,000 inhabitants.⁹ In about the same period, it was lower in Surrey (12) but at a similar level as that of the capital in Herefordshire (40).¹⁰ The homicide rate for the town of Oxford in the 1340s, just before the Black Death, stood at a record high of 110.¹¹ No English rates are available between the midfourteenth century and the mid-sixteenth.

Continental homicide rates are overwhelmingly urban. The Oxford record was matched by the city of Florence, which, in the second half of the fourteenth century, also boasted 110 per 100,000 inhabitants.¹² Apart from these extreme figures, rates around 50 were not uncommon – in Dutch and German towns among others. Utrecht’s homicide rate averaged 53 in the first half of the fifteenth century and in Amsterdam it was 47 by the middle of that century. In Freiburg im Breisgau in the second half of the fourteenth century, the rate fluctuated between 60 and 90.¹³ From various local publications, Martin Schüssler collected homicide rates for a number of towns in present-day Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic in the fourteenth century: Speyer (30), Nürnberg (42), Augsburg (60), Regensburg (20), Olmütz/Olomouc (77), Liegnitz/Legnica (70), Breslau/Wroclaw (27), and Kracow (64).¹⁴ Available Swedish rates are for Stockholm (38 in the 1470s and 1480s) and the small town of Arboga (23 between 1452 and 1543).¹⁵ In a few cases, inflicted wounds appear to have been registered more or less systematically, but there was probably still some “dark number” remaining. The annual physical injury rates per 100,000 inhabitants are 234 for Regensburg (1324–50) and 175 for Kracow (1361–1405).¹⁶ Another Regensburg source, complete for the years 1410–59, lists oaths taken by people who left the city after a term in jail; 647 of them, about 108 per 100,000 annually, had committed assault.¹⁷

The unavailability, outside England, of reliable quantitative data about rural homicide is unfortunate. Partly to compensate for this, I have calculated minimum estimates referring to the end of the period dealt with in this chapter. They are based on data, provided by Marjan Vrolijk, concerning petitions either for a safe conduct or for a pardon after a murder in the Dutch provinces of Holland and Zeeland, both still largely rural at the time. The rates of homicide for which a petition was drawn up average 15 in the years 1531–5, 18 in 1546–50, and 16 in 1561–5.¹⁸ These are minimum rates, because they exclude an unknown number of murders which resulted in no petition at all. But even if the majority of killers had written a request to the Court of Holland, the numbers suggest the untenability of a “peaceful countryside versus violent towns” hypothesis.

Admittedly, the historical literature, including Schüssler’s article, contains lower figures as well. However, these are derived, without exception, from criminal prosecutions or similar types of court proceedings; i.e., they refer only to killers who were arrested and tried. The higher rates just mentioned refer to cases with known killers, usually including fugitives who might be banished by default or offenders who escaped trial through reconciliation. Although a few historians argue that we should simply consider all homicide figures together, from whatever source they derive, this argument cannot be accepted. Obviously, in every case in which an unknown number of killers escaped trial, the real number of murderers – those tried plus the dark figure – cannot have been lower than the number of prosecuted homicides; it must have been higher. Even most of the elevated homicide rates just mentioned exclude cases whose killers remained entirely unidentified and who could therefore not even be banished from the city. Clearly, the higher figures are closer to the mark. The more reliable source of body inspections, available in parts of Continental Europe from the mid-sixteenth century onward, never yields rates above 20 per 100,000 – and usually much lower, except in a few marginal regions. To conclude, the quantitative figures unequivocally point out that interpersonal violence was a relatively common element in medieval life compared to later periods in European history.

Not only homicide rates, but also most of the qualitative evidence about medieval violence derives from urban settings. This state of affairs necessitates a closer look at urban life. Who inhabited and who ruled the towns of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and what kinds of activity went on in them besides fighting?¹⁹ Although these towns differed from each other in some respects, the resemblances, ultimately, were more important. The differences primarily concerned their size and economic function. As far as we can tell from the available evidence, economic or demographic conjunctures do not seem to have had a significant influence on the amount of interpersonal violence or the ferocity of vendettas. Homicide rates continued to be high and feuds flared up time and again throughout the period 1300–1550. The Black Death, too, although the occasion for collective violence against Jews and lepers, made little difference over a longer term.²⁰

The oldest towns had been built around a pre-existing structure, often a castle or an abbey. Newer markers were the cathedrals that the citizens themselves had built, and the various market squares. The palaces which great families erected in Italian cities and the public buildings of Northern Europe were made of solid stone, but by the fifteenth century timber still predominated among the great majority of ordinary dwellings. The danger of fire always lurked around the corner and the inhabitants probably feared it more than the violence associated with feuding. Volunteers manned the fire brigades, organized by district or street. Bathhouses, bakeries, and breweries were obliged to open their ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Romeo’s Kindred: The Fragility of Life in Medieval Europe
• 2. Sealed with a Kiss: From Acquiescence to Criminalization
• 3. Swords, Knives, and Sticks: The Social Differentiation of Male Fighting
• 4. Patriarchy and its Discontents: Women and the Domestic Sphere
• 5. Marks of Innocence: Babies and the Insane
• 6. M for Less: The Marginalization of Murder, 1800–1970
• 7. The Tables Turned: 1970 to the Present
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index