History is rarely pretty. It tends to be ugly, messy, and often pretty disgusting. If you spent time watching our videos here at Flashback, you should know all about this. We don’t shy away from the bizarre, the unsettling, or even the truly grotesque. But while we’ve covered plenty of disgusting stuff in our videos, some things just don’t quite fit.
We make our videos around big themes, big events, big moments in the human story. And we don’t simply go chasing those gross-out topics or the shock value within them. But for this video, we’re going to make an exception. For this one, we put together a rundown of some of the most stomach-churning incidents in history. The nausea-inducing deaths that we’ve simply never had the chance to cover before.
From burning crowns and exploding coffins to cesspool drownings and even the systematic destruction of a living human being, this one gets pretty nasty. It runs the full gambit of depravity and downright unpleasantness. But as with all our videos, you will learn something. You might come up the other side feeling like you need to take a shower, but you’ll also have some cool facts to impress your friends with.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. There’s plenty of stuff we have just missed or didn’t have the space to cover. So, if you feel like we really missed something important, let us know in the comments. And with that, let’s get on with the video. First up is György Dózsa. 1514 was a difficult year in the Kingdom of Hungary.
This was the year that tens of thousands of peasants roved across the land and threatened to topple the 500-year-old monarchy. With the soldier and revolutionary György Dózsa at their head, the rebels struck terror into the heart of the accepted aristocratic order. But those aristocrats weren’t going to let an upstart like Dózsa rob them of their birthrights.
And so on July 15th, 1514, they inflicted a crushing defeat on the rebels at Timișoara in modern-day Romania. Dózsa was captured along with many of his men. Perhaps 70,000 peasant rebels were tortured. But the most disgusting punishment was reserved for Dózsa himself. He was mocked by his captives who called him the “peasant king” and jeered at him in his chains.
“You’re worthy of a throne,” they said sarcastically. “And so, a throne you will have.”
Dózsa’s throne was made from iron, which had been heated to a searing temperature. The defeated Dózsa was forced into his symbolic chair, and the scent of burning flesh quickly filled the chamber. With Dózsa’s agonized roars reverberating off the walls, a burning hot iron crown was placed upon his head.
The metal fused with his skin, and the coronation was complete. So Dózsa was crowned, and as he writhed and bucked amid waves of blinding pain, nine more rebels were led into the room. At the head of this sorry parade was Dózsa’s younger brother, Gergely. Dózsa watched as Gergely was cut down and sliced into three pieces. Dózsa’s captives then took burning hot tongs and began to open the rebels’ flesh.
The remaining eight rebels were led to the feet of their king. Each had been starved for days beforehand and every one of them was overtaken with ravenous hunger.
“Now you can eat,” the hungry men were told, “but you must take the meat with your own teeth.”
The rebels who obeyed this command leant forward and bit chunks of flesh directly from their deposed leader. Those who refused were executed. Of course, Dózsa himself did not survive, but he lived long enough to watch himself be eaten alive by his former comrades.
July 26th, 1184 was just another day in the long and often confusing history of the Holy Roman Empire. Conrad, the Archbishop of Mainz, was not pleased because he was in a dispute with Ludwig III of Thuringia. What else was new? In the complex network of polities and rivalries that made up the HRE, there was always someone in dispute with someone else. Still, Henry VI of Erfurt decided that this dispute needed resolving and resolving swiftly.
So, he offered to mediate. He sent out invitations to dozens of nobles across the empire. They were all to come round to his and together they’d get the feud sorted. We’re not quite sure how many people were packed into the two-story building close to Erfurt Cathedral on that July day, but we do know this: it was too many people. Among them was Heinrich I of Schwarzburg who allegedly had a peculiar habit when in company.
According to the folklorist Ludwig Bechstein, Heinrich was wont to remark, “If I did that, I’d have to drown in the privy.”
It’s possible that Heinrich made this quip that very morning as the building began to heave and sway under the weight of the assembled nobles. Something else was heaving too: the floor of the second-story room. It creaked, groaned, and then it gave way. Most of the nobles plummeted through the hole that suddenly opened beneath them to the ground floor below.
King Henry and the Archbishop avoided this unpleasant tumble. They were either perched in a solid stone alcove or they were clinging to the window railings depending on which account you read. But Heinrich and dozens of others were not nearly so lucky. They suffered severe injuries as they ricocheted off the masonry on the lower floor. The impact of dozens of noblemen suddenly smashing into the ground floor was simply too great.
And so this floor also gave way, sending the hapless aristocrats plunging into the stinking mire of the latrines beneath them. There are tales of people lying critically wounded on stone buttresses, slowly choking to death on the grim fumes emitted from the cesspit, but many more simply drowned in the cesspit itself. As they took lungfuls of excrement and all manner of other bodily effluent, their strength faded from them.
Somewhere between 60 and 100 nobles died in this horrifying way on a sweltering, disgusting July day in Erfurt. Ludwig was one of the survivors, although he did have to be rescued after taking an impromptu dip into the latrines. His dispute with Conrad was not resolved that day. Surprise, surprise. I guess the survivors had other things on their minds.
The nobles of Erfurt are not the only people who have died falling into a latrine. Duke Jing was the leader of the Jin state during China’s tumultuous Spring and Autumn period. Jing reigned for 19 years, which was a pretty good innings for the period. During this time, he’d experienced bitter defeat at the hands of the Chu and the Zheng states, but won back some of Jin’s lost honor at the Battle of An, where the Jin defeated the rival Qi armies.
But then in 581 BC, he fell ill. He abdicated his throne and began to contemplate his own mortality. After consulting with a shaman, he learned he would not live to taste that autumn’s wheat harvest. But when the harvest was presented to him in September of 581 BC, he felt pretty victorious. He had the false shaman executed.
But the writer Zuo Qiuming records what happened next. As Duke Jing was about to taste the wheat, he felt it necessary to go to the privy, into which he fell and so died. One of his servants had dreamt in the morning that he carried the marquis on his back up to heaven. At midday, the same servant carried Jing on his back out from the privy and was afterwards buried alive with him. The shaman’s prediction had come true in the foulest of ways.
And lucky for Duke Jing and for his servant, Heraclitus was a supremely intelligent fellow. He’s celebrated as one of the leading pre-Socratic Greek philosophers and fragments of his work “On Nature” have inspired countless thinkers over the last two and a half thousand years. Some of his aphorisms are still used today, such as “on those who step into the same rivers, different and different waters flow.”
If you’ve never heard this before, don’t worry. These days, it’s more commonly presented as “no man steps into the same river twice” or “it’s not possible to step into the same river twice.” Anyway, he may have been very smart, but he wasn’t thinking too clearly when in 475 BC he decided to try and cure his dropsy. Dropsy is caused by a buildup of liquid in the body’s tissues which results in unpleasant, painful, and often debilitating swelling.
According to Diogenes Laertius, Heraclitus had grown tired of this illness, so he came up with a novel idea. He gathered as much cow dung as he could find and smeared himself in it. This is pretty gross in and of itself, but Heraclitus was at least trying to achieve something with his bizarre cure. He believed the dung would draw out the moisture from his flesh and relieve the hideous swelling.
It seems Heraclitus was soothed by the experience as he quickly fell asleep. While he dozed, the cow dung was baked in the sun and set hard. The philosopher was then encased in a solid armor of cow manure and was basically abandoned to the elements. Fortunately, he was found. Unfortunately, he was found by a pack of wild dogs who promptly devoured the stricken thinker as he lay bound within his foul-smelling prison.
A quick caveat to this one though is that there’s a more than reasonable possibility that this didn’t happen. Diogenes was not a contemporary of Heraclitus and was writing some 700 years later. Some have suggested that the story is actually a joke. Heraclitus described human souls as either wet or dry and believed the dry form of the human soul was the better of the two.
So this account of Heraclitus trying to draw moisture out of his body may have simply been a kind of parody of his ideas. That being said though, we still felt the need to include it on our list because it is pretty gross.
Anaxarchus was another Greek philosopher and another man whose grim death was preserved for the ages by our reliable friend Diogenes Laertius. We don’t know too much about Anaxarchus’s life and work. He was born around 380 BC and studied at the school of Democritus. He was a key supporter of Alexander the Great and even accompanied him on his campaigns into Asia.
It was while traveling with Alexander in Tyre in 331 BC that Anaxarchus managed to annoy Nicocreon of Cyprus. Apparently, Anaxarchus’s joke did not go down too well and Nicocreon vowed his revenge on the philosopher. Some years later, Anaxarchus was forced to land his ships on the shores of Cyprus. And now, Nicocreon had his moment.
He sentenced Anaxarchus to death, but in a fantastically cruel manner. He ordered Anaxarchus to be placed into a huge bowl, essentially an enormous version of a mortar used for grinding flour. And of course, there must be a pestle to go along with this mortar. So, Anaxarchus was essentially ground into nothingness. His body was tenderized and brutalized until he was basically a bag of crushed bones and shattered organs.
In fact, according to Diogenes’ account, Anaxarchus remained alive during the ordeal, and his newfound bodily state was not lost on him. He allegedly remarked, “You merely pound away at the bag of Anaxarchus. You’re not pounding Anaxarchus himself.”
Nicocreon was presumably surprised and annoyed that Anaxarchus was a) still conscious and b) still able to speak. He roared back that he would cut out the tongue of the errant philosopher so he would speak no more. Anaxarchus decided to save his tormentor a job and bit off his own tongue before spitting it at Nicocreon. Not long after this, Anaxarchus’ repulsively crushed and battered body expired. That is, of course, assuming we can trust old Diogenes Laertius. For the purpose of this video, why not? Let’s take his word. That definitely happened exactly as written.
Charles II of Navarre is often referred to as Charles the Bad. After a life spent bumping off his political rivals and generally being a bit of a hell-raiser, by 1387, his wild ways seemed to have caught up with him as he was stricken by some mysterious illness that left him paralyzed. In the 14th century, paralysis was not well understood. In fact, it seems to have been completely misunderstood by his court doctor.
To ease the king’s seized-up joints, the physician recommended that Charles be sewn into a sheet, soaked with brandy, and placed upon a bed warmed by pans of hot coals. Many of you would have already spotted the problem. This kind of behavior seems like it would be several degrees more dangerous than smoking a cigarette at a petrol station.
But Charles trusted his doctor, and he was right to do so. The pans of hot coals did not ignite the highly flammable sheet. Instead, his servant ignited it for him. While sewing the king into his sheets one evening, the servant discovered that one of the sheet’s threads had come loose. And rather than cut off the thread, she burned it off with a candle.
Of course, the whole thing went up in flames. According to the chronicler Jean Froissart, “By the pleasure of God, or of the devil, the fire caught to his sheets, and from that to his person, swathed as it was in matter highly inflammable.”
The servant apparently ran away, leaving the king to his agonizing fate. Charles did actually survive, but not for long. With grotesque burns covering his entire body, he lived out his last days in acute, raw-edged agony.
Okay, this one isn’t so much a disgusting death, although the death is certainly not pleasant. Instead, it’s more of a disgusting aftermath to a death. William the Conqueror was what you might call an alpha male, and not in the irritating modern sense of that term. He was robust, tough, and smart, and he was a strong commander in the field.
A contemporary monk described him as “great in body and strong, tall in stature, but not ungainly.” And this makes sense. He basically changed the course of British history forever, ending the Anglo-Saxon period and giving us all those nice stone castles that we love so much. He also enjoyed a good scrap. This went pretty well for him at Hastings in 1066 when he was only 39.
But 20 years later, he was still at it. Now in his late 50s, the summer of 1087 found William on campaign in Vexin in France. He was by now way past his best, but he still managed to achieve victory at the Battle of Mantes. Unfortunately though, this military victory actually turned out to be an enormous personal defeat for William.
By most accounts, the king was thrown against the pommel of his saddle. The impact of this damaged the king’s internal organs, most likely his bowels. This would have been a deeply unpleasant and highly painful way for the great conqueror to meet his end. There was more unpleasantness to come, however.
William was buried at the Abbaye-aux-Hommes in Caen. During the funeral, a local man burst into the ceremony and started raving about how the abbey had been built on his land. The interloper was quickly paid for his trouble. This would have been pretty embarrassing for the soul of the old king, but fate had one last and far grimmer trick up its sleeve.
William’s bloated body was too large to fit into its tomb. In the hot summer of 1087, his already sizable frame had swelled still further as the gases within his rancid, churned-up innards expanded. By now, those in attendance had grown tired of waiting for this disruptive ceremony to come to an end. It was surely a bad omen for a funeral to go on this long, and so they pushed and prodded and shoved the conqueror until finally he slotted into his tomb.
Unfortunately, the pressure on the king’s rotund body was too much. He exploded, releasing a wave of god-knows-what that trickled down into his tomb. The semi-liquefied remains of King William I were laid to rest, and it took weeks to get the smell out of the abbey.
Now, there are a few honorable mentions we need to make before we get to the final entry on our list. We really wanted to include some ancient examples. So, as you saw earlier, we placed quite a lot of weight on the writings of Diogenes Laertius. These accounts may be true or they may be false. They probably are false, but we felt they were worth covering because they were just so fun to read and research.
However, there are other disgusting deaths that were almost certainly untrue. Take for example Edward II of England. Edward II’s reign did not come to a natural end. In fact, he was captured by the rebel Roger Mortimer and forced to abdicate. He was then imprisoned at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire.
Here, so the legend goes, he was murdered by having a red-hot poker inserted into his anus, which burned his internal organs. This is a really gross story, but it’s likely to be just that, a story. Edward was not a popular king, and his possibly sexual, possibly not relationship with Piers Gaveston was definitely controversial.
Modern historians believe that the red-hot poker story was a bit of homophobic propaganda designed to further humiliate and discredit the king. No one knows precisely how Edward died, so it’s not impossible, but it’s not likely either.
Another disgusting death, which probably isn’t true, is that of the Archbishop of Mainz, Hatto II. During a famine in 974, Hatto apparently told the local peasantry that he would come to their salvation. He asked them to wait for him in a barn where he would lavish them with food. But once they were inside the barn, Hatto locked the doors and torched the building.
As the peasants screamed and wailed, Hatto said, “Hear the mice squeak.”
Hatto did hear the mice squeak. On returning to his castle, he found himself assailed by a vast army of rodents. The mice and rats poured across the river and entered Hatto’s tower, where they sat upon the archbishop and gnawed him to death. A poem about the event goes like this:
“They have whetted their teeth against the stones. Now they picked the bishop’s bones. They gnawed the flesh from every limb, for they were sent to do judgment on him.”
Needless to say, there’s a good chance this never happened. In fact, Hatto may have already died a non-mouse related death four years earlier. The fact that several other European nobles and aristocrats have similar tall tales about them, like Popiel of Poland, suggests that this one isn’t true.
I’ve also omitted death by dysentery from this list simply because loads of people have died from dysentery or by a similar ailment. Henry I famously died of some sort of horrible bowel condition after eating a surfeit of lampreys. The ever-unpopular King John contracted dysentery in September 1216, but apparently still thought it was a good idea to eat a cartload of peaches that October.
This may have finished him off in a spectacularly gross fashion. President Zachary Taylor had only been in the White House for 16 months when he decided to celebrate the Independence Day of 1850 by necking loads of iced milk and cherries. The resulting intestinal problems killed him several days later, making him the third shortest-serving US president to date.
Finally, I just want to mention two that we’ve already covered in quite some detail on this channel already. One of those is the latter years of Henry VIII’s life, which were really gross as the king was beset by festering sores and ghastly digestive issues. The other one is the death of Mithridates in the 4th or 5th century BC, which is certainly a candidate for one of the most disgusting deaths of all time.
Mithridates apparently killed Cyrus the Younger and was sentenced to death by Persian king Artaxerxes II by the infamous “boats” method. Mithridates was imprisoned in the hollow between the hulls of two boats, forced to ingest a mixture of milk and honey, and then had this mixture poured over his face.
As he baked in the sun, he became covered by a multitude of flies which feasted on the milk and honey covering him. According to Plutarch’s account, “creeping things and vermin then spring out of the corruption and rottenness of the excrement and enter into the bowels of him. His body is consumed.” It’s grim.
Anyway, if you want to know more about Henry VIII’s demise or the wretched end of Mithridates, take a look at those two videos once you’re done with this one. For now, though, let’s finish off this list.
When Balthasar Gérard stepped out from a dark corner by the staircase of the Prinsenhof in Delft on July 10th, 1584, he earned himself a place in the history books. Gérard fired two wheel-lock pistols into the chest of William the Silent, the de facto leader of the emerging Dutch Republic.
William did not survive the assault and Gérard became the first man in history to assassinate a head of state with a firearm. The assassin was sentenced to death, but immediate death was considered too quick and merciful for a crime of this magnitude. So, first he must be tortured. To begin, Gérard was hung by his hands on a tall pole.
Meanwhile, tormentors took turns to lash his flesh with a whip. This caused livid wheals and wounds upon his skin. His torturers applied honey to the wounds and then in a bizarrely creative flourish they brought in a goat to abrade the open wounds with its rough tongue. The goat wasn’t having it though, so the torturers decided to use other more reliable methods.
They burned his hands and arms with boiling oil and they flayed him repeatedly. At the end of the day, they bound his hands and feet in an awkward position so that he could get no respite. The torturers continued this for four days. Gérard was doused in boiling fat and hung by his hands with 150 kg weights attached to each of his big toes.
To complete his agony, Gérard was fitted with a pair of boots made from uncured dog skin. I say fitted, they were actually several sizes too small for him. The boots were then heated up in front of a fire so that they contracted and crushed the feet within. Tearing off the boots took much of the flesh with it, leaving two skeletal stumps behind.
He was branded on the chest and under the arms and then wrapped in a shirt that had been soaked in alcohol. By the end, the tormentors were running out of ideas. They drove sharp iron spikes beneath the nails of his hands and feet and poured some more of the bacon fat over him. For four days straight, Gérard had been systematically destroyed. But now he could finally die.
But of course, the death itself was slow to come. At his place of execution, he had his flesh torn from his breast with red-hot pincers. Then he was quartered and disemboweled while still alive. His chest was opened and his heart was ripped out and tossed unceremoniously into his face.
This probably killed him, but just to make sure, they then chopped his head off. Gérard’s antics with his pistols earned him a place in the historical record, but it was his torture and execution that secured him a place on this list, as Balthasar Gérard endured what is surely one of the most disgusting deaths of all time.
