Humanist Martyr | Hypatia of Alexandria

?350 - 415: Age 65?

"Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth — often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable." — Hypatia of Alexandria

Hypatia was a mathematician, philosopher, and astronomer. Despite the intense misogyny of the times, she rose to prominence on the basis of her intellect and her excellent teaching, attracting students from all over the civilized world. At a time of intense religious sectarianism, she was a humanist, studying everything with equanimity, believe fervently in — and preaching — the importance of freedom of thought.

She had friends in powerful places, and this certainly protected her but also made her a target. The Christian Archbishop was a fanatic, and believed that her influence over the city's leaders was blocking the proper flourishing of Christianity. He and his supporters spread rumours about her, claiming she was involved in black magic and an instrument of the devil — all the usual things. Bishop John of Niku, writing two centuries later, claimed that "She was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through her Satanic wiles." Yup, if anyone comes at you with an astrolabe, it's a safe bet they're using their Satanic wiles.

During Lent in 415 Hypatia was in her carriage on her way home from teaching when she was waylaid by a mob of Christian zealots. They dragged her from her carriage into a local church, where they tore off her clothes and attacked her with sharp shards of pottery and shells. They literally scraped and tore her skin off, eventually pulling her apart limb from limb and then burning her body.

Nobody was ever arrested for the crime, and no charges were every laid. The Archbishop, who was widely believed to have been behind the murder, was canonized after his death by the Catholic Church. He was praised three centuries later by Bishop John of Niku for "he had destroyed the last remains of idolatry in the city."

Hypatia is the only female included in Raphael's famous painting The School of Athens.

Three more quotes by Hypatia, who really was extraordinary:

"Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond."

"All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final."

"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all."

Sources: Skyscript, The Life and Legacy of Hypatia

February 14 | Richard II

January 6, 1367 - February 14, 1400: Age 33

Richard II was actually not a horrible king, but he lacked one essential quality: the ability to understand how to compromise among competing concentrations of power. He naively believed that absolute power should, and therefore did, lie with the King, i.e., himself. It did not. In England and in anywhere else, any leader rules by consent of multiple social and economic power bases. Piss off enough of those bases, and you're out.

In 14th century England those bases were the established nobles, many of whom he sidelined in favour of his friends. When they pushed back, he pushed harder, and the ultimate crisis came when he imprisoned and murdered the most powerful lord of the realm, the Duke of Gloucester, and exiled two more. He was childless at the time (his wife was just 13). The putative heir to the throne was a great-nephew, but the real threat was another nephew, Henry Bolingbroke, whom he also exiled.

Exiling a group of powerful nobles to a wealthy foreign country not entirely devoted to your interests is a very bad idea. Bolingbroke gathered a force, returned to England, and deposed Richard without encountering any resistance: nobody would lift a sword in favour of the King. Richard was captured and taken to London, where crowds threw garbage at him. He renounced his crown before Parliament and was imprisoned in Pontefract Castle, where he died around the second week of February, 1400, either by starvation or murder. Henry Bolingbroke became Henry IV.

In some versions of the tale, including that of Raphael Holinshed, a chronicler of the 16th century and source for Shakespeare's play, Richard II is murdered, and very dramatically at that:

"Sir Piers entered the chamber, well armed, with eight tall men likewise armed, every of them having a bill in his hand. King Richard perceiving this, put the table from him, and stepping to the foremost man, wrung the bill out of his hands, and so valiantlie defended himselfe, that he slue foure of those that thus came to assaile him. Sir Piers being half dismayed herewith, lept into the chaire where king Richard was wont to sit, while the other foure persons fought with him, and chased him about the chamber. And in conclusion, as king Richard traversed his ground, from one side of the chamber to another, and comming by the chaire, where Sir Piers stood, he was felled with a stroke of a pollar, which Sir Piers gave him upon the head, and therewith rid him out of life, the 14th of February, 1399. It is said that Sir Piers of Exton, after he had thus slain him, wept right bitterlie, as one stricken with the pricke of a giltie conscience, for murthering him whom he had so long time obeied as king."

And here is why I've included Richard II's death here: Sir Piers of Exton is my ancestor. The name "Exton" is given to many of the men in my family on my mother's side in commemoration of this.

Sources: Wikipedia; Fox, George, The History of Pontefract, in Yorkshire, 1827.

January 5 | Alessandro de' Medici

July 22, 1510 - January 6, 1537: Age 26

Alessandro de' Medici was the Duke of Penne and the Duke of Florence. He ruled Florence from 1930 until his death in 1537, making him one of the most powerful men in Europe. An illegitimate son of the powerful Medici family, he was one of the last males of the "elder branch" of the powerful family. Acknowledged by Lorenzo II de' Medici, many scholars today believe that he was in fact the son of Giulio de' Medici, who became Pope Clement VII in 1523. His mother was an African servant named Simonetta da Collavechio.

Until recently, stories about Alessandro generally centred around his licentious lifestyle. According to Malcolm Forbes in They Went That-a-Way, he "organized sexual orgies, raided convents and invaded private homes in search of new women, and murdered those he considered to be his opponents." Today, views have shifted. Current evaluations of his career emphasize the political difficulties he was facing (a powerful republican faction opposed him in Florence) and present his sexual adventures as something not far out of the norm for his class and his times.

Why? I believe it is because he was half black. He is recognized today as the first African who held high office in Europe. It makes sense to re-evaluate his career in a way that makes him seem less...diabolical. The portrait at top is the typical portrait used to illustrate articles about him....but the image at right is being used more and more. Google his image using this link, and you'll see the range of colour tones visible in his portrait — often the same portrait is presented in darkened or lightened form.

I really don't know who to believe. Reading about Alessandro de' Medici is a bit like reading about two different people. Was his father Lorenzo, or Giulio? Was he black, or white? Was he a bastard, or does his acknowledgement make him legitimate? Was he a wicked libertine, or an energetic young man sowing his wild oats?

What I do know is that he had an interesting death. His best buddy was a poor and distant cousin named Lorenzino. Intensely jealous of his powerful cousin, Lorenzino got as close to him as possible, plotting to kill him and seize his power.

His opportunity came during the New Year's carnival in 1537. He persuaded Alessandro to come to his rooms without a bodyguard, in order to meet a certain beautiful woman. While Alessandro was waiting alone, he got rather drunk and passed out. Lorenzino returned with a paid assassin and plunged his sword into his cousin's back. Alessandro jumped up, yelling, and grabbed Lorenzino, who tried to stop his cries by pushing his fingers into his mouth. Alessandro bit his fingers to the bone. The accomplice rushed forward and tried to intervene, but accidentally wounded Lorenzino slightly instead. Then Lorenzino managed to sink a dagger deep into Alessandro's side, and the accomplice slit his throat.

While they were cleaning the blood from their hands and arms Lorenzino told the assassin who it was he had just killed. Terrified, the man ran away to confess. Lorenzino panicked and ran away too; away from Florence, all the way to France, where he lived safe from reprisal another 12 years (he was murdered in Venice in 1547 by another cousin, Cosimo).

Sources: Wikipedia; Great People of Color; Forbes, Malcolm, They Went That-a-Way, Simon & Schuster, 1988.

November 18 | Malcolm Carter

August 10, 1977 - November 18, 1978: Age 1

Malcolm Carter was the son of Tim Carter and Gloria Rodriguez, members of the Peoples Temple, led by the Reverend Jim Jones. They lived in Jonetown, a special compound in Guyana to which Jones had led his followers to escape unwanted media attention in the US. A number of former cult members had given extensive interviews to the media about some of the weird things going on in the group.

The weirdness came from Jim Jones. Charismatic (obviously) and passionate about issues relating to social justice, Jones attracted a large following of idealistic, educated, hard working people who believed in creating a better world, one without racism, greed, and social injustice. As his following grew, Jones relied more and more on underhanded methods of social control such as faking "healings", controlling the sexual lives of his followers, and extreme social censure, even punishment, for people who stepped out of line. Personally he relied more and more on drugs and alcohol to maintain the level of energy needed to control such large numbers of people and to feed his own delusions.

After a disasterous visit by a US Senator that ended in a shootout on the tarmac of the airport as the Congressional party was leaving, Jones persuaded his entire congregation to commit "revolutionary suicide" as a protest against the inhumane world. Most of them did. This was done by drinking a flavoured drink laced with cyanide. The children were dispatched first, some by their own parents. Infants like baby Malcolm were given the drink with a needle-less syringe in the mouth.

Malcolm's father, Tim Carter, was paralysed with shock as he saw his baby dead in his wife's arms, and then felt his wife die in his arms. Carter himself did not die. He was given a special job to do that took him out of the compound. In his own words:

It was about this time that Christy Miller is standing up and saying, "You know, I don't want to die." I'm just thinking, "Buy time, buy time, buy time." Then Maria Katsaris approached me from the radio room, and she said, "Come here. I think I have something for you to do." She said, "Mike Prokes has a mission. He has some suitcases that have to be delivered to the Soviet Embassy in Georgetown, but they're too heavy. He can't take them all by himself." It turned out to be a million and a half dollars.

She said, "If you make it that far," she goes, "Take what you need to live on, and have a good life." She says, "But under no circumstances are you to be caught." She goes, "If you are caught, then you are to kill yourself." Mike Prokes said, "You need to go ask Jim if he wants the truck to take us to the front gate."

As I walked up to the back of the pavilion, I looked to my right, and I saw my wife with our son in her arms, and poison being injected into his mouth. I felt, "This isn't happening. This can't be happening. This is unreal. I don't know to how to even process this. They're murdering my son."

And I took a step up on stage, and I asked the question that I was supposed to ask, "Do you want the truck to take us to the front gate?" I had a gun. I thought about shooting Jim Jones. He might die. I definitely will die. Will it stop everything that's going on?

And I just thought of Gloria and Malcolm. I stepped off the stage, and she was kneeling down. Malcolm was dead, and I held her and said, "I love you. I love you. I love you so much. I love you so much. I love you so much." And she died in my arms. And after she died, I really didn't care about anything at all, except I wasn't going to die there.

When I left Jonestown with those suitcases, my only goal was to get out alive. We dumped the money on the way to Port Kaituma. My days with Peoples Temple and Jim Jones were done. I wasn't going to carry out any mission.

More than 900 people, including Malcolm and his mother, died in the "revolutionary suicide". Most died of poisioning but some of gunshots, including Jim Jones, who was found dead of a single gunshot wound. It is not known whether he shot himself or not. Because of the unusual circumstances, most of the deaths were ruled murder, not suicides.

Click here to read some perspectives from Jonestown survivors. This is an extremely interesting and worthwhile site to visit as it seems to reflect in part the ongoing healing process of many of the survivors.

Click here for a YouTube excerpt from a PBS documentary about the cult. There are 5 parts uploaded on YouTube; this is Part 1. I encourage you to watch all 5 parts. You can see and hear Tim Carter speaking about his family's death in Part 5, but I suggest you watch the other parts first in order to have a larger sense of the story.

Sources: Wikipedia, NPR, PBS site about the documentary, ReligiousTolerance.org, Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple

November 15 | Dalai Lama VI

1683 - November 15, 1706: Age 23

Tsangyang Gyatso was one of those men you can't put in a box, figuratively speaking. He was recognized at the age of 5 as the reincarnation of the Fifth Dalai Lama, but immediately put into hiding. The political situation in Tibet was deemed too unstable to announce the death of the old Dalai Lama, and in medieval Tibet it was not impossible to hide someone's death from much of the country and the outside world for some years. In 1697 the death of the Fifth was announced, as was the news that the Sixth had been found. Thus began Tsangyang Gyatso's short career as a public figure.

In 1701 the Regent, who had been protecting him, was the victim of a Mongol-ordered assassination (Tibet, China, and the Mongols have a long history of mutual influence and interference). The young Dalai Lama left his studies and renounced his monk vows, and embarked on a life of booze and romance. He continued to function as Dalai Lama, but insisted on wearing layman's clothes and refused to ride in a special palanquin and other spiritual perks. The love songs he wrote for his paramours are very highly regarded in Tibetan literature.

Using this behaviour as an excuse, in 1706 a Mongol king deposed Tsangyang Gyatso and declared a 25-year-old Lama the "real" Dalai Lama. The Tibetans would not accept him. Another Mongol tribe was invited in to oust the one that had deposed him — this is classic Tibetan history, there's always another Mongol tribe to invite in for an invasion. By 1717 the unwanted Mongols had been defeated, but it was way too late — Tsangyang had died mysteriously in 1706 while being spirited out of the country.

Sources: Wikipedia, BBC News

Note: I can't resist pointing out that at around the time Tsangyang was being kidnapped, Johann Sebastian Bach was walking 400 miles to Lübeck to study organ with Dietrich Buxtehude. Music nerd stuff.

October 22 | Pretty Boy Floyd

February 3, 1904 - October 22, 1934: Age 30

Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd was one of the most romanticized bank robbers of depression era America. The subject of songs, books, and at least five films, Floyd began robbing at the age of 18 when he stole $350 in pennies from a local post office. He earned his nickname when a witness at one of his early heists described him as "a pretty boy." Floyd hated the name, but it stuck.

He quickly graduated from post offices to banks, supposedly robbing dozens of them throughout the midwest over the next three years. At the age of 21, he was arrested for a payroll robbery in St. Louis and sentenced to five years in prison. He was paroled after three and vowed he would never see the inside of a prison again. As it turned out, he was right.

Floyd quickly returned to the only career he knew, robbing banks and payrolls throughout the midwest. He was caught once and sentenced to fifteen years, but escaped while being transported to the pen.

He was probably blamed for many more robberies than he actually committed. As Woody Guthrie wrote, "Every crime in Oklahoma was added to his name." By 1930, he was branded a "public enemy" by the FBI, but to many who had lost or were afraid of losing their farms or homes to bank foreclosures, he was a hero. He was protected and sheltered by locals almost everywhere he went.

Floyd was shot down on October 22, 1934 near East Liverpool, Ohio. According to the FBI report, he was ambushed in a cornfield, drew his .45 caliber pistol, and began firing and cursing at the police. When they returned fire, Floyd yelled "I'm done for; you've hit me twice." He died fifteen minutes later. Another account, by Chester Smith, a retired East Liverpool Police Captain, claims Floyd was only wounded in the shootout and that he was then shot at point-blank range — effectively executed — by FBI agent Melvin Purvis.

Floyd's body was embalmed and shipped to Oklahoma. His funeral was attended by between twenty and forty thousand people. It remains the largest funeral in Oklahoma history.

Sources: Wikipedia, Crime Library

This entry was composed by my husband Tim Hurson. Thanks Tim!

October 13 | The Emperor Claudius

August 1, 10 BC - October 13, 54: Age 64

Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus was the grandson of Mark Anthony and Octavia (Augustus Caesar's sister) on his mother's side, and of Livia (Augustus' third wife) on his father's side. His strong connections with the imperial family of Rome would have marked him for untimely death but for one thing: he was considered an idiot and a cripple.

Claudius had some kind of physical ailment — it may have been cerebral palsy, Tourette's syndrome, or polio — but there was nothing whatever wrong with his intellect. His knees were weak, his head shook, he stammered and slobbered when excited, and he had a peculiar voice. In materialistic Rome, beauty was thought to reflect inner virtue and intelligence, and physical defects reflected moral and intellectual lacks. This certainly saved Claudius from the many purges of eligible and well-connected males undertaken by Augustus, Tiberias, and Caligula and their allies. His own mother despised him, and made no secret of it. As a youngster his family hired a mule-driver to babysit him, on the assumption that his afflictions were the result of a stubborn and dull temperament.

But Claudius was by no means an idiot. In later life he admitted to having exaggerated his defects as the perfect disguise to defend himself; he could not, however, hide his intelligence from everyone: the historian Livy and the philosopher Athenodorus tutored him as a teenager. He undertook to write a history of the Civil Wars, and this nearly undid him: they were a bit too accurate. Fortunately his mother and his grandmother Livia saw the danger and put a stop to it. This incident presumably confirmed their assumption that he was unfit for public office.

Augustus died when Claudius was 24. The succeeding emperors, Tiberius (his uncle) and Caligula (his nephew), set about destroying every other male member of the imperial family in their purges — except Claudius. In 41, Caligula was assassinated, and the conspirators began to search Rome in order to kill members of the imperial family. Claudius took refuge in the palace, hiding behind some curtains, where a guard named Gratus found him and spirited him away to safety. After some debate, the Senate agreed to accept him as the new Emperor.

Then followed, contrary to nearly everyone's expectations, 13 years of sober and conscientious rule and a period of peace and expansion that must have been a great relief after the chaotic years of Caligula's mad rule. It would have been longer, but Claudius died, probably poisoned, in 54.

Accounts of the time agree that it was likely a dish of mushrooms that delivered the fatal dose. It is generally accepted that the instigator of the poisoning was his wife, Agrippina, whose son Nero was poised to succeed his stepfather. For several months before his death Claudius and Agrippina had argued a lot, and Claudius had been showing signs of raising his own 13-year-old son Britannicus to a status higher than that of Nero (in ancient Rome it was not uncommon for stepchildren to be favoured over natural children, particularly if there were residual bad feelings about the natural child's mother). To Agrippina and Nero, it was important that Claudius die before Britannicus grew any older.

Claudius was immediately deified by Nero. Seneca, an enemy whom Claudius had banished in 41, wrote the satire, Apocolocyntosis divi Claudii (The Pumpkinification of the Divine Claudius) a few months after his death ("apocolocyntosis" is a mangling of the word "apotheosis", meaning deification). Seneca writes of his last words as follows: "This was the last utterance of his to be heard among men, after he let out a sound from that part with which he found it easier to communicate, 'Oh I think I have shit myself.'" Seneca goes on to remark, "He certainly shat up everything else." On the whole, however, most of his contemporaries and virtually all historians judge Claudius to have been a popular and competent ruler.

Sources: Wikipedia, The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine

October 11 | Meriwether Lewis

August 18, 1774 - October 11, 1809: Age 35

Meriwether Lewis is best known for co-leading the expedition (with William Clark) that did more to open up the American West than any other. On this two-year expedition, begun in 1803 when he was 28 years old, Lewis catalogued hundreds of new plants and animals, made friendly first contact with a number of native groups, and laid the groundwork for the trade economy that ultimately turned the United States into an economic empire. During this arduous journey — the intention was to find a workable route to the West coast — only one of the 11 men who accompanied them died, and that man died of appendicitis. The expedition was so successful that Thomas Jefferson, then President, appointed him Governor of the Louisiana Territory.

Lewis proved to be far less able as a politician and administrator than as an expedition leader. He quarreled with the local authorities and made enemies. He couldn't keep his accounts straight. Washington refused to cover some large expenses he had paid himself, leaving him deeply in debt, and he left for Washington in 1809 to try to straighten things out.

Today the journey from St. Louis to Washington is a 13-hour drive. In 1809 it was actually easier to take a boat down the Mississippi to New Orleans and then board a ship to go through the Gulf of Mexico, around the Florida panhandle, and up the East coast — and this is what Lewis set out to do. On the way downriver, however, he seems to have suffered a mental breakdown and was put ashore at Chickasaw Bluffs (now Memphis) to recover. After a couple of weeks of recuperation, he borrowed some money and set out on an overland trail.

On the night of October 10 he stayed at a home 72 miles from Nashville. There were two log cabins on the property: Lewis stayed in one and the owner in the other, and his servants stayed in a barn some distance away. During the night the owner was alarmed by Lewis' agitated behaviour — he stayed up into the morning hours pacing and mumbling about the unfairness of his situation. Then she heard a gunshot, a thud, and Lewis' voice saying "Oh Lord!" There was another shot, and Lewis stumbled over to her cabin and banged on the door, saying "Oh Madam! Give me some water, and heal my wounds!" She was alone with her children; her husband was away. Already spooked by his strange behaviour, she was too terrified to open the door. After two hours she sent one of her children to fetch his servants.

They found Lewis lying on his bed, shot in the side and in the head. Part of his forehead was shattered and his brain was exposed, but he was alive. He begged them to kill him. His last words were, "I am no coward, but I am so strong. It is so hard to die."

The general consensus in Washington was that he had committed suicide. He had tried to kill himself on two previous occasions, he had made a will during the river journey from St. Louis, and his behaviour during the last week of his life was definitely strange. Yet his wounds as described were not exactly consistent with that notion. Who shoots themself in the side? He had many enemies, and the $100 he had borrowed for the overland journey was never found.

Sources: Forbes, Malcolm, They Went That-a-Way, Simon and Schuster 1988; Wikipedia

September 30 | Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes

November 27, 1843 - September 30, 1888: Age 44
? - September 30, 1888: Age unknown

Elizabeth Stride was born in Sweden, and worked there as a domestic servant and a prostitute before coming to London in the late 1860s. There she met and married carpenter John Thomas Stride. The marriage seems to have lasted 10 or 15 years, but the couple were definitely separated when Stride died in 1884. During the 1880s she took in sewing and did domestic work, with some prostitution on the side to supplement what must have been a tiny income. She had been arrested a couple of times for drunk and disorderly behaviour, but overall was described as having a calm temperament and was liked by her friends.

Catherine Eddowes (right) had a more difficult life. She had had a couple of children by a common-law husband, but had left the family due to severe drinking problems. She had a boyfriend, with whom she went out into the country to do harvest work; they had just returned to London and were broke. At 8:30 on the evening of her death she was arrested by police for public drunkenness; once the pubs had closed they released her, thinking she would go home.

Around 1:00 in the morning on Sunday September 30, a steward of a club in Whitechapel (a district of London) drove his cart into a square and discovered a woman's body. It appeared that she had just been murdered, as blood was still gushing from her slashed throat. This was Elizabeth Stride.

Meanwhile, about a 20 minute walk away, police were releasing Catherine Eddowes from custody. She walked to the poorly lit Mitre Square, about a ten-minute walk from the Bishopsgate Police Station. At 1:44 a police constable discovered her second body lying in Mitre Square. This time, the murder had not been interrupted. Although, like Stride, she had been killed quickly with a slashed throat, her body had been horribly disfigured and mutilated after death. It was determined she had died about 15 minutes before her body was found; thus about 30 minutes after Elizabeth Stride. They were the 3rd and 4th victims of Jack the Ripper, the only two to be killed on the same day. It is thought that because the murder of Elizabeth Stride had been interrupted, the killer had sought a second victim to meet his needs.

People who feel compelled to kill multiple victims, secretly, in a cruel manner seem to have always been part of humankind, but industrialized society, with the technology to communicate forensic information and public alarm, has given the phenomenon a public face. Jack the Ripper was not the first serial killer by any means, but he was the first one whose name became known worldwide. He was never caught.

Sources: Find-a-Grave (1) and (2), Wikipedia. I am not providing the links to the Wikipedia article as they show autopsy photographs, which you may not like to see.

September 21? | King Edward II

April 25, 1284 - September 21?, 1327: Age 43

The son and heir of the brilliant and ruthless Edward I, Edward II was “strong and handsome in body, weak and foolish in character” (Ronald Hamilton). He ruled in difficult times, but did it badly and, perhaps more important, tactlessly. Being openly gay is not in itself a game-ender when you are powerful, but heaping honours and titles on your palace squire boyfriend is pushing it. Edward and his homies didn’t bother hiding their contempt for various nobles, making fun of them with stupid names. Edward was equally foolish in his domestic and foreign policy, and his report card includes an ignoble defeat at the hands of the much smaller army of the Scots rebel Robert Bruce.

By 1324 there was an effective conspiracy that included the Queen and her boyfriend, who had possession of the Crown Prince. With plenty of baronial support, they seized power and deposited the King, imprisoning him in a filthy dungeon in the hope that he would die “naturally” of some disease. When he didn’t, they had him murdered. The date of death was uncertain, but it was announced officially on September 21.

It is not certain how he died, but a writer who knew someone who lived at the castle at the time claimed some years later he was “ignominiously slain with a red-hot spit thrust into his anus”. This horrible account, whether true or not, at least expresses the deep hatred and resentment Edward’s homosexuality aroused. It would also have ensured a clean corpse for display at the funeral.

Sources: Hamilton, Ronald, Now I Remember, The Hogarth Press, London, 1983; and Forbes, Malcolm, They Went That-A-Way, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1988.

September 11 | Beatrice Cenci

February 6, 1577 - September 11, 1599: Age 22

Beatrice Cenci was the daughter of an Italian Count named Francesco Cenci. He had a dubious reputation, and kept Beatrice and her mother virtually prisoners in his country castello while he amused himself with the vicious pleasures of Rome. His visits home were no picnic for the women, as he was said to have abused both of them physically and sexually.

One day in 1598 a great commotion was heard in the castle. The locals rushed over to find Beatrice's mother screaming, Beatrice "strangely silent", a splintered wooden balcony, and the Count's bloody body 30 meters below it in a gully of rocks and shrubs. He was definitely dead. In fact, oddly enough, he was cold. Moreover, when the body was washed, it was discovered that he had somehow acquired several stab wounds in the head that were not quite consistent with the notion of a fall.

A year of investigations revealed that the Count had been drugged and then two men had entered the castle and driven an iron spike into his head. They pushed the body off the balcony and made a hole in the balcony floor to make it look like an accident, but neglected to get rid of the bloody sheets and mess inside. Extensive confessions (obtained under torture) revealed that the men had been hired for this purpose by the Count's family. Both murderers died during the investigation: one ran away but got his head cut off by a bounty-hunter's hatchet, the other died under torture. Although Beatrice never confessed, it was believed that she had been the most determined of the conspirators, urging the men on when they hesitated at the last minute. The whole family was found guilty.

Alhtough Beatrice never confessed, nobody doubted her culpability. The Count was extremely unpopular and the common people had no trouble believing he had abused Beatrice. That, combined with her youth and beauty — she was thought to be about 17 — made her a cause célèbre. Widespread protest of the verdict did bring about a brief stay of execution, but in the end the Pope ordered that the sentences be carried out. (The family estate reverted to the Church.)

On September 11, 1599, one year and two days after the murder, the sentence was carried out. The elder brother, Giacomo, was publicly tortured to death. Beatrice and her mother were beheaded. The other brother, being only 12, was considered by the judges to have been too young to have had anything to do with it. Even so, he was sentenced to be present on the scaffold with his family to witness their executions before being sent to the galleys for a life of slavery. Today, Beatrice's ghost can be seen every year on the night of the eve of her execution, walking the Sant'Angelo Bridge where the scaffold was built, carrying her severed head.

Over the years the story of the desperate innocent girl driven to murder by her father's abuse seized the imagination of artists, playwrights, poets, and filmmakers. The portrait by Reni (shown here) was a big part of that continuing interest; many wrote about its inspiring effect. Mary Shelley, writing of her husband's interest in the legend (he wrote a play about it), said that the portrait's "beauty cast the reflection of its own grace over her appalling story; Shelley's imagination because strangely excited." Stendhal wrote of "a poor girl of 16 who has only just surrendered to despair. The face is sweet and beautiful, the expression very gentle, the eyes extremely large; they have the astonished air of a person who has just been surprised at the very moment of shedding scalding tears." Dickens foudn it "a picture almost impossible to be forgotten", full of "transcendent sweetness" and "beautiful sorrow". Hawthorne found it "the very saddest ever painted or conceived: it involves an unfathomable depth of sorrow", and further wrote, "She is a fallen angel — fallen and yet sinless."

Modern historical research is such a buzzkill. Reni was Bolognese and didn't even paint in Rome before 1608, nine years after her death. It's much more likely the portrait is one of the Muses, and the link with Beatrice is a based on pure speculation ("probably the Cenci girl" written in a catalogue in the late 18th century). Moreover, documentary research has turned up a record of her birth and shown that "the poor girl of 16" was 22 when she was executed. Finally, there is some suggestion that she had an illegitimate child — a plausible explanation for her "imprisonment" in the castle.

It is obvious that the Cenci family was dysfunctional, even abusive; there is plenty of evidence supporting that. However this story, that grew into a rather simplistic drama laced with sex and violence, is deeper and more complicated than the myth.

Sources: Beatrice Cenci: Storia del secolo XVI (Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi), Screaming in the Castle (Charles Nicholl), Wikipedia

September 8 | Gesualdo

March 8, 1566? - September 8, 1613: Age 47?

Don Carlo Gesualdo was the Prince of Venosa and Count of Conza. He was a brilliant musician and composer. He was also a sexual sado-masochist, manic depressive, and murderer. He was really nuts.

He married a young widow whose first husband’s untimely death was said to have been caused by too much sex. Gesualdo was her fourth husband. After four years of marriage, he surprised her in bed with another man and murdered them both on the spot, stabbing them repeatedly and then displaying their naked bloody corpses on the steps of his palazzo as a lesson in morality for passers-by. Some say he also murdered his own child by this woman, but this is disputed.

As a nobleman, Gesualdo could not be prosecuted; but as an in-law, he was vulnerable to revenge at the hands of his wife’s family, so he turned over a new leaf, moving to another city and marrying his cousin. Unfortunately he couldn’t escape from the intense remorse he felt for his violent behaviour, and his life degraded into a cycle of sexual excess, sado-masochism (he insisted on being beaten three times daily), and ill-health (he was asthmatic). He died in 1613.

His music, however, is brilliant, and he wrote a lot of it, most famously many madrigals (songs) that are intensely sad and disturbing yet strangely beautiful. The most famous is Moro lasso:

Moro, lasso, al mio duolo,
E chi può dar mi vita,
Ahi, che m'ancide e non vuol darmi aita!

O dolorosa sorte,
Chi dar vita mi può,
Ahi, mi dà morte!

English:

I die, alas, in my suffering,
And she who could give me life,
Alas, kills me and will not help me.

O sorrowful fate,
She who could give me life,
Alas, gives me death.

Sources: Musicweb-International, Wikipedia, Choral Public Domain Library