A 14th-century devil in Omne Bonum - British Library MS Royal 6 E VI f 396v
The Annales Fuldenses, or Annals of Fulda, is a source for 9th-century events in Carolingian lands: the incursions of the Northmen, fighting among the royal relatives, and omens in the sky. It also contains the story of an unfortunate village, an even more unfortunate villager, and the evil spirit that haunted both.
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Source:
The Annals of Fulda: Ninth-Century Histories, Volume II. Translated and annotated by Timothy Reuter. Manchester University Press, 1992.
Script:
Early in the year, a sign was seen written upon the sky in a language well known to those who recorded these things. Such events were to be read as portents of famine, collapse, plague, or death, for the world above was not generally looked to for good omens. Perhaps they just went underreported.
We read that, quote:
“A comet appeared on January 18th in the first hour of the night with an exceptionally long tail, which prefigured by its appearance the disaster which quickly followed. For Louis’s illness grew worse and on January 20th he died. His body was taken up and buried next to his father in the monastery of St Nazarius, which is called Lorsch.
Hearing this the army which had been sent against the Northmen broke off the attack and returned without finishing the [effort]. The Northmen followed the tracks of the departing army and burnt with fire all that they had previously left intact, as far as the castle of Koblenz, where the Moselle enters the Rhine. The restoration of the city walls of Mainz was begun and a ditch was built around the walls outside the city. The Northmen left their fortification and attacked the city of Trier, driving out or killing its inhabitants and burning it down completely on April 5th. Wala, bishop of Metz, [then] came against them rashly with a small army and [he] was killed.”
We’re not talking about that particular comet today, that particular royal death, or that iteration of the Northmen coming south in violent raids, nor are we discussing the unfortunate bishop of Metz who unwisely went against them and was slain. But we are talking about stories which were written in that same source and about one story found there in particular.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast which journeys that world in the footsteps of its travellers, or at least that’s what it normally does, and more on that in a moment. It is a podcast with a Patreon, to be found at patreon.com/humancircus, where you can listen earlier, more often, and in the absence of advertising other than me rambling, as I currently am, about Patreon. Today, I want to especially thank Jose Martinez and TennoTimur for their generous support. Thank you both very much!
Now, let’s get back to the story.
Last time out, it was a standalone episode about the pirate, merchant, and adventurer John Crabbe. Today, we’ll be up to something a little different, and a little aside from our usual focus on travellers of one kind or another and a little shorter than our usual runtime. As we are in and around the Halloween season at the moment, today I’ve gone for something appropriately supernatural, for ominous sights in the stars and the earthly disasters they accompanied, and for possession and the doings of evil spirits.
In the past around this time of year on the podcast, we’ve heard from 14th-century chronicles about mountaintop demon palaces and surprisingly talkative disembodied hands. We’ve heard from 12th-century chronicles about dead men who rose from the grave to haunt and hinder those around them, and about eerie and otherworldly encounters with something like the fae or fairies. We’ve heard from 11th-century chronicles about parallel societies of the dead, revenants in the churches, and variations on stories of the Wild Hunt, a favourite from folklore, The Witcher series, and so on. Today, we reach back a little further than that.
For this episode we’re going all the way back to the 9th century, a time that we really don’t visit often enough. We’re going back to the Annals of Fulda, a contemporary account of east Frankish Carolingian rule. It is thought to have been at least partly written at the Abbey of Fulda in what is now the German state of Hesse, has often been attributed in part to the monk and scholar Rudolf of Fulda, but the question of authorship—or authorships, as it’s certainly not the work of one hand—has long been an open one.
I am going to be rambling here for a bit about the book and some of what you find in it. I realize now that I’m actually going to end up talking about the weather or crops for a startling amount of the time, but be reassured that I am winding my way very gradually toward the story of an evil spirit and the unfortunate villager whose life it made very, very miserable. We’re just going to be making stops with certain other pieces from the source along the way.
It’s the sort of text where you can read of one royal brother scheming against another, of the failings of fortresses or crops, or just an entry like that for the year 853 when thieves had broken into a church that September and taken treasure when they went, their identity still unknown. It’s a text which illustrates the connection that was understood to exist between events observed in nature and human activity, and a text where tales of diplomacy, treachery, or an attack by the Slavs might sit alongside a report that in the summer of 872:
“The hail destroyed the crops in many places, and terrifying thunder and lightning threatened mortals almost daily with death: it is said that immense bolts killed men and draught animals in various places and reduced them to ashes. The cathedral of St Peter at Worms was also burnt by heavenly fire and the walls nearly destroyed.”
Elsewhere in the text we read that “In the same year there were comets for several nights. Springs and rivers rose greatly because of the unusually heavy rainfall and did not a little damage to buildings and crops in several places. This curse was followed by a great hunger with immense loss of life throughout Germany and Gaul.”
What was seen in the sky was intimately connected to what played out on the earth: a dimming of the sun associated with a terrible cattle plague that was followed by many deaths, a comet above prefiguring flash flooding bad enough to sweep away not only the living but also the buried dead which the waters unearthed. And you’ll find other examples of that connection.
In this text you might read that in 838 there was an earthquake in Lorsch, south of Frankfurt, ships were built against the Northmen, and Charlemagne’s grandson Pepin I Aquitaine died that year. In 839 you read of Louis the Pious dividing his realm between his sons Lothair and Charles the Bald, and you read that, quote:
“In the same year a comet appeared in the sign of Aries and other portents were seen in the sky. For the clear sky turned red at night and for several nights many small fireballs like stars were seen shooting through the air.”
So it went on into the next year, with the contentious doings of the imperial family on the one hand, and on the other an “exceptional reddening of the sky” for some nights in the southeast and for others in the northwest until they “met in a cone and gave the appearance of a clot of blood in the heavens directly overhead.”
On the eve of Ascension that May there was “so great an eclipse of the sun around the seventh and eighth hour of the day that,” quote, “even the stars could be seen because of the veiling of the sun, and terrestrial objects changed colour.” During that same period, the emperor “was stricken by a sickness and became seriously ill.” He was brought to a certain island on the Rhine to recover, but his sickness only worsened there, and on June 29th he died.
Such was quite often the basic rhythm of the text, with strife below and signs above. So it was in 841 as the imperial sons struggled among themselves over who should get what and brought about “such slaughter on both sides that,” quote, “no one can recall a greater loss among the Frankish people in the present age.” “On December 25th,” that year’s entry concludes, “a comet appeared in the sign of Aquarius.” And so it was in the next year, as the violent disagreement continued and there was recorded “an eclipse of the moon on March 30th, the fifth day of the week before Easter, in the tenth hour of the night.”
Sometimes, as in 845, the Northmen come, making it as far as Paris that year, only to be put off in part by battle and in rather larger part by payment. Sometimes, as in 847, there was peace of a sort, at least between those imperial sons. “This year,” the writer declared, “was free of wars,” but still, “The Northmen burned and laid waste Dorestad,” and there were other signs of unease.
A woman named Thiota, having apparently caused disturbance elsewhere, had come to Mainz, telling those who would listen that she knew the date of the end of the world, “and other things known only to God.” The world, she said, “would see its last day that [very] same year,” and many listened to what she said. There were commoners who brought her gifts and asked to be included in her prayers but also clergy, who ”followed her as a teacher sent from heaven.” Under questioning, she told the authorities that a certain priest had coached her in these false claims which she’d made only to benefit herself. There was a public flogging and she halted her prophecies, at least as far as the chronicle was concerned. The world, as you already know, went on.
In 849, the trouble was another foe, and again there was a supernatural connection of sorts, if one that smelled suspiciously of explaining away quite practical military failures, for “an evil spirit announced through the mouth of a possessed man that he had been in charge of the Bohemian war and his allies had been the spirit of pride and discord through whose treacherous machinations the Franks had fled from the Bohemians.”
And there will be more from the Annals of Fulda, after this quick break.
…
Moving to the 850s, we find a time of earthly disturbance. There were tremors in Mainz and there was unusual weather which brought whirlwinds and hail. There were many buildings burned by lightning, including a Würzburg church, where the lightning strike occurred during vespers and burned many of the clergy. The church’s walls would finally collapse in another terrible storm the following month.
That same fall saw “thick showers of tiny fireballs like arrows going westward throughout the night,” and the month after that the death of the emperor, who had taken himself away to a monastery.
There was another church struck by lightning in Cologne, where people were taking refuge from a storm and ringing the bells to implore God. “Suddenly a powerful lightning-bolt like a fiery dragon ripped open the church and penetrated inside,” wrote our chronicler, killing three and severely injuring six more. Mainz was repeatedly battered by earthquakes, and another church wall crumbled. There were marvels at Trier, the chronicler wrote, but they had no certain and reliable report on those events. They were more comfortable with relating the extremely ominously red snow that was to have fallen in the winter of 860, a particularly hard winter that caused a great deal of damage to trees and to crops.
“[Back] at Mainz [in 870] the sky shone red like blood for many nights,” wrote the chronicler, “and other portents were seen in the heavens.
One night a cloud climbed up from the north and another from the south and east, and they exchanged bolts of lightning continuously. In the end they met overhead and as it were fought a great battle. All who saw this were amazed and afraid and prayed that these monstrous things might be turned to good.
The lands around that same city were struck by two earthquakes. Several men gathering in the harvest in the district of Worms were found dead because of the heat of the sun, which was fiercer than usual. Many were also drowned in the Rhine.
A certain woman cooked bread for sale on the feast of St Laurence [August 10], while others were going to church. Her neighbours implored her to give the day the honour due to it and go to church, but she did not wish to leave what she had begun and lose her profit. But as she preferred earthly reward to reverence for the saint, she found that the loaves which she put in the oven, made from the same dough from which she had earlier baked fine bread, were suddenly blacker than ink. Bewildered, she hurried outside and showed to all present the sin which she had committed in ignoring so great a feast-day and the loss she had sustained through the spoiling of her bread. There was also a serious cattle pestilence in many parts of Francia, which caused irretrievable loss to many.”
That year, a church was consecrated, and it was said that the night before voices were heard in that church, evil spirits complaining that they would now need to find themselves a new home. And that very same year, a building collapsed around the king as he rested.
A few years later, in 873, the king’s youngest son, Charles, sought to plot against his father, but as the chronicler of the time put it, “he who had wished to deceive the king chosen and ordained by God was himself deceived; he who had treacherously set traps for his father fell himself into the snares of the Devil, so that he might learn from his diabolical torments.”
Charles was taken to the church and had to be restrained by men who he threatened to bite, using that same mouth to say “aloud in the hearing of many that he had been delivered into the power of the [Devil] as many times as he had plotted against the king.”
There was famine that year, all throughout Italy and Germany, “For at the time of the new crops a plague of a new kind and one seen for the first time among the Franks appeared to vex the German people not a little for [their] sins.” “Worms like locusts with six feet and flying on four wings came from the east, and covered all the face of the earth like snow, and ate everything green in the fields and meadows.” They were wide-mouthed and long-stomached with two stone-like teeth that could gnaw through the toughest of bark. Where they landed, they devoured one hundred ploughlands of corn in an hour. Where they flew, “they so covered the sky for the space of a mile that the sun’s rays scarcely appeared to those on earth,” an almost daily spectacle of horror that went on for a full two months. There was that, and then there was the rain of blood over Brescia lasting for three days and nights.
But we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves here, for the particular story I wanted to tell occurred back in 858, during that decade of earthquakes and storm-ridden churches, and it happened at a village near the town of Bingen.
There was, the chronicler wrote, an evil spirit at work in the village. There were, it seems to be implied, often evil spirits about, but this one “gave an open sign of his wickedness. First by throwing stones and banging on the walls as if with a hammer, he made a nuisance of himself to the people living there.” A poltergeist, we might say, at least so far, but the spirit was not limited to thrown stones or banged walls. It had a voice.
It’s not clear at this point what form this took. Was it a disembodied voice, speaking from those walls or the air itself? Was it very much an embodied one, a case of possession of some kind. Such is certainly not specified here, unlike in other instances in the book, though we are hardly dealing with the work of a single author from whom consistency in such things might be expected.
However it worked, this evil spirit used its voice first to speak of what had been stolen from this person or that, the items great or small that they may have noticed missing, whether they suspected theft at that point or still expected to find the object somewhere that they had not yet looked. It did this, and it stirred up enmity among the inhabitants of that village, using its voice, I suppose, to foster blame and anger where there had been none, or where there had indeed been some simmering below the surface but still restrained. Then it directed that enmity against one man in particular.
He was the reason they suffered so, said the evil spirit, he and his sins for which all in the village were now punished. Then, so that their hatred may be hotter still, it made it so any house that man entered would catch fire. It was a situation sure to make a scapegoat of even the most well-liked of individuals, and soon the hated man with his wife and children were forced to live outside the village in the fields and even their own family would have nothing to do with them, so loathed and feared was the man.
Even in life out there on the fields, he was not spared or allowed peace, for next, when he had gathered and stacked his crops, the evil spirit came upon him and burnt them. There was nowhere to go for the cursed villager, no refuge, no one who would take him in, nowhere he was safe from the fire and the influence the evil spirit had on those around him. In the face of a village full of people who all wanted to kill him, the poor man even had to submit to the ordeal of the hot iron to try and prove his innocence, and maybe that’s self explanatory or you remember it from the Grettir series, but I think I should probably explain what was involved.
What we’re looking at here is a kind of appeal to heavenly judgement in which an accused party would be made to carry a red-hot iron over a set distance. If they managed the feat at all, obviously excruciating, did they do so uninjured? That would probably be ideal. But if the wound was wrapped and then checked a few days later to see if God had intervened to heal it or it had instead become infected, well that could tell the tale too.
It was clearly a horrifyingly painful experience to have to go through, but at least it seems to have established to everyone what we already knew. Neither this man nor his sins, whatever they may have been, were responsible for the misfortunes of the village, the fires, and the missing objects, and so on. They were going to need to try something else.
Priests and deacons were called for from Mainz, and they brought crosses and relics with which to expel the evil spirit. But even as they went about the business of exorcism with litany and holy water in a house that had been particularly affected, the spirit in question was hurling stones at men who approached the house, wounding several of them. Even immediately after they finished their work and departed the village, that spirit was using its voice to make itself known again. It made “lamentable speeches in the hearing of many.”
This time, it did not blame the previous scapegoat, but rather a certain priest. It said that it had sheltered from the holy words and water beneath the mantle of that priest and it was clear that the priest had not been an unwitting aid to the evil spirit. The people crossed themselves in fear at what they heard, for the undoing of one who was supposed to protect them in such matters was surely a fearful thing, and the “same devil” informed them that, quote, “He is my servant. For anyone who is conquered by someone is his servant, and lately at my persuasion he slept with the daughter of the bailiff of this [village].” To this last bit of information, unknown to the villagers except for those involved, the chronicler quoted Matthew 10:26, writing that “nothing is hidden which will not be revealed.”
“With these and similar deeds,” they then concluded, “the apostate spirit was a burden to the above-mentioned place for the course of three whole years, and [it] did not desist until [it] had destroyed almost all the buildings with fire.”
The spirit had come and made itself known in the village. It had sowed evil and spread distrust, leading to much suffering for one family in particular. It had undermined their trust in the leaders of their little community, and it had basically burned the entire place down. Then, apparently, it had “desist[ed],” no further word on what might have become of it or the affected town from there.
I hope you enjoyed hearing about this little Halloween story and the 9th-century source it came from. I’ll be back again soon with more medieval listening, and I’ll talk to you then.