A Criminal History of Mankind (64 page)

Thanks to Richelieu, France came out of the Thirty Years War stronger than ever, so that the next king, Louis XIV, was able to behave like a Roman caesar. If anyone stood a chance of recalling the ways of an old-time conqueror, it was the Sun King, who had so much money that he was able to bribe half the monarchs of Europe. He was certainly strong enough to revoke the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and outlaw Protestantism in France. He built Versailles and had the sense to choose as his chief minister a shopkeeper’s son - Jean Baptiste Colbert - who revolutionised France’s industry and made it rich. Then, powerful and secure, he began to behave like an emperor. He flatly declined to entertain Colbert’s idea that the nobles ought to pay taxes like everybody else, since he felt that wealthy and idle nobles ought to decorate the court of a truly great king. The result is that Louis drained the national wealth as fast as Colbert created it. Then, deciding that a great king ought to be a great conqueror, he found an excuse to pick a quarrel with Spain, marched 120,000 troops into the Spanish Netherlands and ended with vast tracts of land and important trade concessions. But the Dutch cities revolted and, under the leadership of William of Orange, gradually forced Louis to withdraw. When William of Orange became king of England by deposing the bigoted Catholic James II, the English and the Dutch, joined by Sweden, Spain and Savoy (on the Swiss-Italian border) so harassed Louis’s forces on land and sea that he was forced to sue for peace. He was learning that, in this complicated modern world, there is no room for absolute emperors. When his grandson, Philip of Anjou, became king of Spain in 1701, Louis saw the chance of a masterstroke - of permanently uniting France and Spain into one empire. This was the last thing the rest of Europe wanted, particularly the Dutch, who had suffered so much from Spain. Louis marched again into the Netherlands to try to force the Dutch to agree, but in 1702, England and Holland declared war on France, and half Europe joined in. The war dragged on until 1713, when Louis finally made peace - having been forced to agree that his grandson Philip could never become king of France. So twelve years of effort was wasted, and Louis felt old and tired and oddly let-down - just as Charles V had in his last years; he died two years later, in 1715. If he had concentrated on trade and expansion in the colonies, the French Empire would have spread across the world, and the people of the United States would today probably be speaking French. As it was, France lost its American possessions within a few decades, and the king of France lost his head before the end of the century. If Louis XIV had not been so determined to play at being Charlemagne, the French Revolution would never have taken place.

If our visitors from space could have revisited the earth at any time between 1450 and 1650, their first impression would have been that things have not changed greatly since the days of ancient Rome. There are still one or two major powers - such as the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor - who dominate most of Europe. The barbarians - the Turks - are still battering at the gates and making inroads. The scene is, admittedly, rather more complex than in the time of Diocletian; but Europe is still a mass of armies marching and countermarching. Christianity, the religion of love and reconciliation, has had no noticeable effect. And perhaps there is no reason why it should, for human nature cannot be expected to change in the course of a thousand years or so. Whole cities are still being wiped out by invading armies, just like Carthage. And there are still plenty of Caligulas and Domitians - men like Sultan Selim I (father of Suleiman the Magnificent), Vlad the Impaler and Ivan the Terrible. In fact, in this respect, mankind seems to have achieved new levels of sadism. Vlad the Impaler - the historical Dracula - was a minor king of Wallachia (now in Rumania), who spent most of his life fighting the Turks, displaying immense bravery and resourcefulness; he was also one of the most appalling monsters in history, deriving tremendous pleasure (undoubtedly sexual) from watching people die slowly. On a lightning raid into Transylvania in 1457, Dracula had his captives - men, women and children - taken back to Wallachia so that he could watch them being impaled - his favourite method of execution. Old woodcuts show the victims impaled through their stomachs, but it seems certain that the wooden stake was driven into the anus or vagina so that the victim’s own weight made him sink down on to it; he gave orders that the end should not be too sharp, so that it would take longer. In a quarrel with Saxon merchants around 1460, he held a mass impalement, and also burned alive four hundred apprentices. The impalements were regarded as an entertainment during meals; one Russian boyar had the misfortune to hold his nose when the smell of blood sickened him; he was immediately impaled on a particularly long stake. Irritated by the number of beggars and sick people in his domains, Vlad invited them all to a banquet, then locked them in and set fire to the building. When he was imprisoned in Hungary for twelve years, and unable to satisfy his taste for torture of prisoners, he tortured animals. He was killed in battle - against the Turks - in 1476, probably by his own men.

Ivan the Terrible - born in 1530 - was a fairly normal Russian tsar - except for a tendency to rape any woman who took his fancy - until the death of his wife, when he was twenty-seven. He then became pathologically suspicious, subject to insane rages and a devotee of cruelty and violence. Here we can see the typical ‘Right Man’ syndrome in its most naked form. When he became convinced that the citizens of Novgorod were planning rebellion - which was almost certainly untrue - he had a wooden wall built round the city to prevent any of the inhabitants from fleeing. Then for five weeks he sat and watched them being tortured to death; husbands and wives were forced to watch each other being tortured; mothers had to watch their babies being ill-treated before themselves being roasted alive. Ivan looked on with insane satisfaction as sixty-four thousand people were killed in this way. But his blood-lust had been sated; when he marched on Pskov to inflict the same punishment, the inhabitants received him on their knees, and he was placated. When he besieged a castle in Livonia, the defenders preferred to blow themselves up with gunpowder rather than fall into his hands.

But as we have seen, the pathology of such cases is relatively simple. A man with a natural ‘spoilt’ temperament is placed in a situation where he can indulge every whim. He could be compared to a glutton who is placed in a situation where he can eat himself to death. Every one of us wants ‘his own way’ as a child, but contact with adult discipline forces us to learn restraint. The Caligulas, Draculas and Ivans are allowed to grow like unpruned trees until they are a tangled mass of overgrown emotions. Their inability to discipline the negative aspect of themselves intensifies their problems. The ego turns into a kind of cancer that consumes them.

Yet fortunately the circumstances that produce these freaks are rare. Most of us are enslaved - and disciplined - by material circumstances from the moment we are born. Our fathers and mothers have to discipline themselves to stay alive, and they make sure that the lesson is passed on to us. The result is that nearly all the ‘monsters’ of history are to be found amongst absolute rulers. They are rare even among the barons and dukes, for people who have daily contact with other people have to learn some kind of restraint. Most of us realise, for example, that to encourage our own anger is one of the lesser forms of self-destruction. Dracula’s contemporary Gilles de Rais is an interesting landmark in the history of crime, for he is one of the first known examples of a man whose political power is limited, yet who developed all the characteristics of the sadistic egoist. But then, he was one of the richest men in France - probably in Europe - and was thoroughly spoilt and pampered as a child. In his twenties - he was born in 1404 - he fought bravely at the side of Joan of Arc and helped to drive the English out of France. Then he went back to his estates and proceeded to spend money with spectacular abandon. He also began to indulge his favourite perversion - the torture and murder of children. His method was to have the children kidnapped, or lured to his castle on some pretext. He would commit sodomy - even with female victims - while strangling the child or cutting off the head. He also enjoyed disembowelling his victims and masturbating on the intestines. Dismembered bodies were then thrown into an unused tower - about fifty bodies were found there after his arrest. Gilles’s downfall came when he beat and imprisoned a priest; he was arrested and tried as a heretic. He had undoubtedly been attempting to practise black magic to repair his fortunes. Threat of excommunication led him to confess, and he was executed - strangled, and then burned - in October 1440. But although Gilles retains a place as one of the first ‘non-political’ monsters in history, his psychology is not really so very different from that of Cesare Borgia. It is again a simple case of the ‘cancerous ego’.

It is this natural tendency of the unconstrained ego to develop criminal tendencies that Christian theologians called ‘original sin’. They saw in it evidence that there is some fundamental weakness -or sickness - in human nature. It also explained why the authority of the Church was necessary. We have seen that the problem can be explained more simply in terms of ‘divided consciousness’, of the fact that man tends to become trapped in his left-brain ego. We have also seen that a great deal of the cruelty in history - for example, of the Romans - was not due to sadism but to an overdeveloped sense of purpose. Like the emperors who built the Great Wall and the great canals of China, they were so obsessed by their purpose that they treated individuals as if they were as unimportant as flies.

All this explains why the kind of crime we find recorded up to the end of the Middle Ages has a curiously non-individual quality. Robbers murder travellers just as a butcher kills cattle; it is a way of making a living. When they are caught, the robbers are executed; but no one bothers to record their deeds. The crimes that the chroniclers feel worth recording are the crimes against authority - treason, conspiracy or coining. Crime on lower social levels is as uninteresting as the activities of rats or fleas.

With the Renaissance, this slowly begins to change, because it is an age of developing individualism. But the individualism only affected the educated classes - and the Church. So it is not surprising to come across a case like that of the priest, Don Niccolo de Pelagati who went in for rape, murder and robbery. He was merely following the lead of the pope himself.

Almost a century after the exploits of Don Niccolo, the Nuremberg public executioner, Master Franz Schmidt, kept a rough diary of the people he executed. A very large number of the entries read simply: ‘A thief hanged’. There are also many women who have killed illegitimate children soon after birth. One maidservant is beheaded simply because she had had children by both the father and son of the house where she worked. But the great majority of the murderers who are executed have committed their crimes in the course of robbery. ‘Elizabeth Rossnerin of Leibsgriien, a day labourer and beggar, who smothered and throttled her companion, also a field worker, and took 4 pounds 9 pfennigs from her. Beheaded with the sword as a favour because she was a poor creature and had a wry neck...’ ‘Frederick Werner of Nuremberg... a murderer and robber who committed three murders and twelve robberies...’ And many of the worst crimes are committed by partners or gangs. ‘Kloss Renckhart of Feylsdorf, a murderer who committed three murders with an associate. First he shot dead his companion, secondly a miller’s man who helped him to attack and plunder a mill by night. The third case was again at a mill, called the Fox Mill, on the mountains, which he attacked at night with a companion. They shot the miller dead, did violence to the miller’s wife and the maid, obliged them to fry some eggs in fat and laid these on the miller’s body, then forced the miller’s wife to join in eating them...’ ‘Niklauss Stiiller of Aydtsfeld... a murderer. With his companions Phila and Gorgla von Sunberg, he committed eight murders. First he shot a horse soldier; secondly he cut open a pregnant woman alive, in whom was a female child; thirdly, he again cut open a pregnant woman in whom was a female child; fourthly he once more cut open a pregnant woman in whom were two male children. Gorgla von Sunberg said they had committed a great sin and that he would take the infants to a priest to be baptised but Phila said he would be himself a priest and baptise them, so he took them by the legs and dashed them to the ground. For these deeds he, Stiiller, was drawn on a sledge at Bamberg, his body torn thrice with red hot tongs, and then he was executed on the wheel.’ But cases like this, involving sadism, are rare. So are sex crimes - not more than half a dozen in twenty-five years. ‘Hans Milliner, a smith, who violated a girl of thirteen years of age, filling her mouth with sand that she might not cry out...’ (Evidently the girl was not killed.) ‘A man beheaded for violating a girl of fourteen.’ Two homosexuals are executed for committing sodomy, and a farm labourer for buggery with cows and a sheep. Apart from the sadism of the robbers, most of the crimes seem to be curiously anonymous; they seem to spring out of circumstances rather than out of a criminal disposition.

From Luke Owen Pike’s
History of Crime in England
we learn that at the same period in England the commonest crimes were robbery and - oddly enough - perjury. ‘Perjury... was the most thoroughly ingrained of all the English crimes.’ This refers to the perjury of witnesses and jurors in court cases. Corruption was widespread, starting with government ministers; everyone was expected to take bribes, and jurors were only following the custom of their betters. Pike remarks significantly: ‘During the reigns of the Tudors, men in the highest positions still resorted to those mean arts which have now, at any rate, descended to a lower grade of society.’ The poor committed the occasional theft and murder; the rich indulged in conspiracy and corruption.

Yet society is now changing fast, and it is inevitable that crime will follow it sooner or later. This is the age of the Elizabethan drama, and the plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe are full of clearly individualised characters - not the wooden types of the
Morte d’Arthur
and
Orlando Furioso
- even of
Don Quixote
. ‘In Shakespeare’s time,’ says Erich Kahler, ‘the destiny of peoples coincided with the destiny of their monarchs and nobles’ (p.500 of
Man the Measure
). And, what is more, the ordinary individual began to feel that he was, in some obscure way, the equal of the monarch and noble. We only have to look at the popular journalism of the time - pamphlets by writers such as Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe - to see that they assumed a very high degree of mental alertness in their readers. Indeed, as Q. D. Leavis argues in
Fiction and the Reading Public
, ‘By modern standards they show an insulting disregard of the reader’s convenience: the dashing tempo, the helter-skelter progress, the unexpected changes of direction and tone so that the reader is constantly faced with a fresh front, the stream of casual allusion and shifting metaphor, leave us giddy as the Elizabethan dramas leave us stunned’ (p.88). People who were capable of plunging into this foaming whirlpool of prose were not afraid of using their minds. Like the ancient Greeks, they loved to go to the theatre and be told a fascinating story of murder and intrigue. But they loved too the simple, almost characterless novels of the time such as Sidney’s
Arcadia
, Greene’s
Card of Fancy
and Nashe’s
Unfortunate Traveller
, in these they didn’t want character - only to be told an interesting story. Yet as soon as men are capable of spending an hour or so in ‘another world’, they have also learned to daydream and to detach themselves from their own narrow lives.