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HEY GAL posted:witch hunters also do magic, at least they did in england. they're worthwhile as long as they succeed but they're still creepy outsiders The French ones apparently didn't, just scammed people for money or something. The Swedish ones I've read about didn't either. It is a very Early Modern thing for the crown to get pissed off by vagrants stealing their authority tho. One of the more striking things about the witch hunts I've read about was the witch trials at Torsåker in Sweden. In a single day, the local authorities executed 71 people for witchcraft, 65 of which were women. They had to dig dikes in front of the blocks so that all the blood from the beheadings wouldn't make the pyres too wet. They executed something like half of the women in the parish, which probably made for the most awkward mass the following sunday, when the women's side of the church was practically empty. Oh, and the executions were completely illegal since the local court should have gotten confirmation from the royal court to carry the executions out, but didn't.
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Jul 11, 2016 21:43
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Kemper Boyd posted:Not military history, but can't be arsed to dig up the Early Modern thread and dunno if it hasn't fallen into archives. From what I recall, witch hunts was a mostly protestant thing, and France was majority catholic. I think there are even letters where a local bishop wrote to Rome about how they had caught a witch, please advise, and Rome answered with a resounding "Witchcraft isn't real you dumbass, let her go".
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Jul 11, 2016 21:48
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ArchangeI posted:From what I recall, witch hunts was a mostly protestant thing, and France was majority catholic. I think there are even letters where a local bishop wrote to Rome about how they had caught a witch, please advise, and Rome answered with a resounding "Witchcraft isn't real you dumbass, let her go". if anyone wants a well-written account of a witchcraft trial in bavaria, check out high road to the stake, it reads like a novel although in the catholics' defense, the guy who wrote a book saying that witchcraft was real but torture produced false confessions was a Jesuit. that dude was cool
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Jul 11, 2016 22:05
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So witchcraft is true, all we need is 'torture light' methods to reveal it? Thanks!!! 
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Jul 11, 2016 22:09
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ArchangeI posted:From what I recall, witch hunts was a mostly protestant thing, and France was majority catholic. I think there are even letters where a local bishop wrote to Rome about how they had caught a witch, please advise, and Rome answered with a resounding "Witchcraft isn't real you dumbass, let her go". Yes and no. Where it was active, the Inquisition tended to be rather sceptical about claims of witchcraft, especially in Spain and Italy which I am most familiar with, but at the same time, the original witch craze found some support from the Pope. Witch hunts did happen in France, but the authorities usually shut them down quickish. Worth noting that France wasn't really buddy buddy with Rome for most of the 16th-17th century either, so it wasn't the Catholic church in France, it was the crown. Marko Nenonen who wrote the book I am reading points toward lack of central authority as a decisive factor in many cases: in Switzerland, the cantons did at times step in to put a lid on things, but noncentral Frenchspeaking regions still had crazy amounts of witch burning going on. Likewise, the Swedish witch craze in the late 17th century started out in the peripheral regions of Sweden and ended fairly quick after it reached the capital, at which point the Royal Commission On Sorcery shut the witch trials down. On the other hand, when you got a monarch who's crazy about holding witch trials like Christian IV of Denmark or James VI of Scotland, you get a lot of witch trials.
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Jul 11, 2016 22:12
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HEY GAL posted:bamberg and bavaria were huge into it though, although the latter's big and self assured enough that they're not gonna write to rome for anything That's a thing that most people don't usually realize, the Pope and Rome don't mean that much after the Western Schism and even less after the Reformation got into gear. Venice managed to get themselves excommunicated sometime in the late 16th or early 17th century and just bribed the local priests to hold mass and do the priest stuff. Even good Catholics could tell the Pope to go eat poo poo and die whenever the Pope's view was in conflict with whatever local politics and there wasn't much the Papacy could do about that.
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Jul 11, 2016 22:20
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Kemper Boyd posted:One of the more striking things about the witch hunts I've read about was the witch trials at Torsåker in Sweden. In a single day, the local authorities executed 71 people for witchcraft, 65 of which were women. They had to dig dikes in front of the blocks so that all the blood from the beheadings wouldn't make the pyres too wet. They executed something like half of the women in the parish, which probably made for the most awkward mass the following sunday, when the women's side of the church was practically empty. Oh, and the executions were completely illegal since the local court should have gotten confirmation from the royal court to carry the executions out, but didn't. Well this is loving horrible.
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Jul 11, 2016 22:25
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did swedes behead people upright? germans did, it's supposedly technically demanding: the subject kneels and the executioner swings his sword in a long flat arc. now in the Papal States the positions of subject and executioner are the same, except what he's swinging is a huge mallet. is it in spain and southern italy that they garotte?
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Jul 11, 2016 22:32
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HEY GAL posted:did swedes behead people upright? germans did, it's supposedly technically demanding: the subject kneels and the executioner swings his sword in a long flat arc. They used blocks, and axes, at least for common people. Edit: So in the Papal States, it was HAMMERTIME
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Jul 11, 2016 22:39
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They took the book "Hammer of Witches" quite literally
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Jul 11, 2016 22:45
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HEY GAL posted:did swedes behead people upright? germans did, it's supposedly technically demanding: the subject kneels and the executioner swings his sword in a long flat arc. The baseball swing execution was really hard to execute correctly and more experienced professionals were sometimes brought in to do it. It was smart too, because every now and then executioners who botched their jobs were lynched by the angry crowd.
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Jul 11, 2016 22:51
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HEY GAL posted:now in the Papal States the positions of subject and executioner are the same, except what he's swinging is a huge mallet.  So basically the subjects would get their heads smashed into a pulp? How the hell were people ok with that??
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Jul 11, 2016 23:04
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IM_DA_DECIDER posted:
they didn't have netflix, so what else would they have watced for fun?
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Jul 11, 2016 23:09
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IM_DA_DECIDER posted:
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Jul 11, 2016 23:12
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IM_DA_DECIDER posted:
I think it's about that thing where the Church said it was really bad for the clergy and associates to spill blood, which got bypassed by using blunt weaponry to cause severe subcutaneous trauma? I think that's how one of William the Conqueror's brothers, who was a bishop, ended up being able to fight at Hastings by circumventing that law by using a mace instead of a sword. Or maybe I read that in the Song of Roland? Or both? It's quite pervasive, mind. Even in D&D clerics are banned from swords, but maces are A-OK.
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Jul 11, 2016 23:14
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HEY GAL posted:did swedes behead people upright? germans did, it's supposedly technically demanding: the subject kneels and the executioner swings his sword in a long flat arc. Yeah, that waist level horizontal cut is really hard for me to do properly with a longsword. What kind of sword were German executioners swinging, anyway?
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Jul 11, 2016 23:21
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Tevery Best posted:I think it's about that thing where the Church said it was really bad for the clergy and associates to spill blood, which got bypassed by using blunt weaponry to cause severe subcutaneous trauma? I think that's how one of William the Conqueror's brothers, who was a bishop, ended up being able to fight at Hastings by circumventing that law by using a mace instead of a sword.
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Jul 11, 2016 23:22
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Tevery Best posted:I think it's about that thing where the Church said it was really bad for the clergy and associates to spill blood, which got bypassed by using blunt weaponry to cause severe subcutaneous trauma? That's a long standing myth. There's zero indication that clergy who fought wielded different weapons from other contemporary soldiers and there's actually plenty of mentions of fighting pirests using things like swords, bows, etc. The myth doesn't even make that much sense anyways. Blood is going to spill when you're smashing someone in the head with a metal club.
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Jul 11, 2016 23:25
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P-Mack posted:Yeah, that waist level horizontal cut is really hard for me to do properly with a longsword. What kind of sword were German executioners swinging, anyway? 
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Jul 11, 2016 23:32
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terminus est; "this is the line of division"
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Jul 11, 2016 23:34
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Grenrow posted:That's a long standing myth. There's zero indication that clergy who fought wielded different weapons from other contemporary soldiers and there's actually plenty of mentions of fighting pirests using things like swords, bows, etc. The myth doesn't even make that much sense anyways. Blood is going to spill when you're smashing someone in the head with a metal club. The first cleric was a vampire hunter in the first D&D campaign and Gary Gygax later made them use maces because a Bishop in the Bayeux tapestry used one.
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Jul 11, 2016 23:42
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100 Years Ago Yesterday: Some extremely annoyed Welshmen fight their way into Mametz Wood, with the aid of the first reference I've seen to a Lewis gun being slung over one man's shoulder and fired from the hip while advancing. Lt-Col Fraser-Tytler spends his day shooting at Trones Wood, with his luck well and truly in. JRR Tolkien's battalion is out of the line again; the Germans launch yet another prepatory barrage at Verdun; the British War Committee grapples with Aristide Briand's badly-thought-out promises to Romania; Louis Barthas has somehow not learned yet that in the Army, one never volunteers for anything; and Maximilian Mugge is waiting in the wings, ready to pick up Barthas's complaining slack. Today: Heave! One last try for Fort Souville and Fort Tavannes; then, like it or not, three points of pressure is going to force the Germans onto a defensive footing at Verdun. The BEF secures control of the gently smoking ruins of Contalmaison. Back at HQ, General Rawlinson now finds himself confronted with a large crisis; a large crisis requires a large solution, and his solution is almost on a level with two pencils and a pair of underpants; Haig responds with a master class in British understatement, which I have helpfully translated. BEF Intelligence has got something correct, sort of; a couple of Lt-Col Fraser-Tytler's subalterns offer a heroic rescue to a wounded Manchester Pal; E.S. Thompson is thrown out of hospital; and Maximilian Mugge is British enough to criticise the class system from the inside. SeanBeansShako posted:Long story short, It is 1861 and while the seeds of tension are slowly being sowed in two different continents in the mainland UK like usual nothing is happening, especially outside the officers mess at the edge of the Fulwood Depot belonging to the 32nd DCLI. So much so, some kids are playing a game whilst the nearby sentry on duty Private McCafferty stands on duty idly ignoring them. Just to pick up on the earlier stuff about WW1-era battalion numbering: this story comes from before the Childers Reforms of 1880, which standardised the four-battalions-to-a-regiment system. Before then, there were a shitload more regiments; the oldest regiments had two battalions and the rest one; and each regiment had a number to indicate the order in which they were formed, or brought into the modern Army establishment. (There was, needless to say, an absolute shitload of wailing and gnashing of teeth over the loss of the old regimental numbers.)
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Jul 12, 2016 00:11
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HEY GAL posted:terminus est; "this is the line of division"
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Jul 12, 2016 00:32
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Kemper Boyd posted:Royal Commission On Sorcery I have a new dream job, or at least dream job title. Commissioner on Sorcery strikes exactly the right balance between "professional bureaucrat" and  .
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Jul 12, 2016 00:34
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The mongols had a thing about not shedding the blood of a holy man, but that mostly amounted to an excuse to find horrible methods of execution to get around the rule.
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Jul 12, 2016 00:46
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SlothfulCobra posted:The mongols had a thing about not shedding the blood of a holy man, but that mostly amounted to an excuse to find horrible methods of execution to get around the rule. Didn't the Ottomans have this too about royalty?
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Jul 12, 2016 00:58
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Hogge Wild posted:The first cleric was a vampire hunter in the first D&D campaign and Gary Gygax later made them use maces because a Bishop in the Bayeux tapestry used one. He didn't though. He had a wooden club, which was really a symbol of office. P-Mack posted:Yeah, that waist level horizontal cut is really hard for me to do properly with a longsword. What kind of sword were German executioners swinging, anyway? Seems like whatever was available, to a point. Urs Graf shows a falchion being used in one example. Then there's this one:
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Jul 12, 2016 01:10
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Blaarg, combat death doesn't weird me out but this stuff does. It's not rational; getting an arrow on some godforsaken 12th century plain or bleeding out from grenade fragments on an island you've never heard of is probably a lot less pleasant, but there's something creepy about "kneel down and say some prayers, some guy will cut your head off or maybe bash you with a hammer" that makes my fuckin' skin crawl.
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Jul 12, 2016 01:25
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Makes sense to me. Combat death might be horrible but at least there's good odds that it's a "me or him" situation between you and some other poor shitlord who really doesn't want to be there. Executions are a very personal thing where someone wants you specifically dead and has engaged a professional to ensure it happens in as scary a way as possible. Heck, as pointed out above that very fear is probably the desired result of the concept of executions.
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Jul 12, 2016 01:31
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Arquinsiel posted:Makes sense to me. Combat death might be horrible but at least there's good odds that it's a "me or him" situation between you and some other poor shitlord who really doesn't want to be there. Executions are a very personal thing where someone wants you specifically dead and has engaged a professional to ensure it happens in as scary a way as possible. Heck, as pointed out above that very fear is probably the desired result of the concept of executions. Really? I seem to recall accounts that executions were done generally to be as clean as possible, with potentially dire punishments for the executioner if they botched the job. Beheading was generally considered to be a more humane way of getting killed than many of the alternatives. Meanwhile the crowd was not there to be frightened, they were there to be entertained. (I suppose the horizontal cut is being used to show off the executioner's skill?) From that depiction, I kinda wonder if there's some substantial artistic license being used to empathise the whole martyrdom thing. Fangz fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Jul 12, 2016 |
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Jul 12, 2016 01:47
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Fangz posted:Really? I think that the horizontal cut was reserved for VIPs.
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Jul 12, 2016 01:52
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SlothfulCobra posted:The mongols had a thing about not shedding the blood of a holy man, but that mostly amounted to an excuse to find horrible methods of execution to get around the rule. It was for royals and they did it for the last Abbasid Caliph by rolling him on a rug then beating the poo poo out of him and having horses trample over it.
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Jul 12, 2016 02:24
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BTW were executioners in Europe a family profession? I know it was for the Sanson clan in France.
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Jul 12, 2016 02:27
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there seems to be kind of a theme re: executioners' swords   V. big, v. heavy, and nobody obviously cares if it can thrust.
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Jul 12, 2016 02:28
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Tevery Best posted:So the Tour de Pologne starts in my town tomorrow, and the authorities put up a mural to make the town all nice and pretty for it! Vital question: how were the Illuminati involved? 
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Jul 12, 2016 02:51
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Fangz posted:Really? Even the modern methods are pretty horrific really.
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Jul 12, 2016 03:17
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Disinterested posted:
that inscription is fuckin' sick If you don't speak German: "I spare no one"
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Jul 12, 2016 03:22
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Strafvollzugsgeräte is also as German as it gets.
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Jul 12, 2016 07:08
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IM_DA_DECIDER posted:Strafvollzugsgeräte is also as German as it gets. tr. Punishment followtrough device
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Jul 12, 2016 08:43
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Nebakenezzer posted:Vital question: how were the Illuminati involved? The Eye of Providence has officially been the coat of arms of my town since 1936 (although the motif dates back to a 17th-century plague and it has been submitted in its current shape no later than mid-19th century; the town was founded in the 15th century, but we do not know what design was in use back then), in commemoration of its role during the Miracle on the Vistula. It is virtually unique within the area, most other towns nearby have Piast eagles or city walls in their coats of arms. So the answer is "very much". Tevery Best fucked around with this message at 09:00 on Jul 12, 2016 |
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Jul 12, 2016 08:54
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