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In the thirteenth century, the Mongols (just at that time they began to be called “Tatars”) enjoyed the reputation of the most bloodthirsty people in history. This dark glory, of course, was based on the general horror of them from China to the Middle East. Noteworthy is the story about the grandson of Genghis Khan Batu, transmitted by the European monk Rikold. He writes that “one noble Turk, who was in the service of Batu, was convicted of treason. Khan sentenced him to death, but the Tatar women asked to give the Turk into their hands. Having got the unfortunate, they boiled him alive and cut him into small pieces, which were distributed to the soldiers so that they would eat them and remember that such a fate was destined for all traitors. nine0003

Many imagined the Tatars as incorrigible cannibals. “… When they captured one of their worst enemies, they gathered together and ate him, avenging his disobedience; like ghouls from the underworld, they also drank the blood of the victim. And one Western witness of their invasion of Europe in 1242 reported that “Tatar commanders and their assistants with dog heads devoured the bodies of their victims, as if it were bread.” (And here we are dealing with evidence of enemies. Note that the very word “Tatars” in the West was erected to the name of hell “Tartar”. Hellish creatures can be attributed any especially disgusting properties. Why should we trust these testimonies more than ” assistants of the Tatar khans with dog heads”?)

By the beginning of the classical period of antiquity, primitive cannibalism was no longer on the Mediterranean coast of Europe; only a trace remained in Greek legends and myths. For example, in the myth of the titan Kronos, who married his sister Rhea. According to the prediction of the goddess Gaia, his own son was to deprive him of power, therefore, as soon as Rey had children, Kronos immediately swallowed them, wanting to avoid the fulfillment of the prediction. So he dealt with Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon. However, Rhea deceived Kronos by placing a swaddled stone instead of his youngest son, Zeus, which he swallowed without batting an eyelid. Zeus was secretly brought up in a cave in Crete; having matured, he made his father drunk with a magic drink, and drunken Kronos spewed out his own children eaten into the world. After a long battle, Zeus threw Kronos and the rest of the titans into Tartarus. Of course, this is just a legend. However, in some areas of Arcadia (the region of Hellas), in fact, there was a custom of sacrificing children. nine0003

The story of the famine

Until now, we have been talking about the ritual eating of enemies or offering sacrifices. There was, however, a reason why cannibalism spread at times to different parts of the earth.

Over the centuries, the peoples of Europe, Asia, Africa and America (although data on it is available only since 1200) suffered from crop failures and famine. History repeated itself over and over again. In 206 BC. in China, “people ate human flesh; Half the population died of starvation. In 178 BC. “there was a hungry pestilence; emaciated people exchanged the bodies of dead children and gnawed at their bones. In 48 – 44 years BC. “The people of Gansu ate human flesh.” In 15 B.C. the same thing happened in Luoyang and in the surrounding provinces. (According to authoritative researchers for example, Liao Ke the expression “eating human flesh” is nothing more than a metaphor. For example, the Chinese expression “to demand someone’s eyes” means “to ask for satisfaction”, but does not mean at all that the petitioner wants to snatch This, of course, does not deny the facts of cannibalism during the famine, which is so frequent in the Middle Empire, but does not mean at all that eating one’s own kind was a common thing.)

Chinese playwrights constantly returned to this theme. In the year 25, whole gangs of cannibals roamed the province of Yunnan; they captured small villages, ate all its inhabitants, and then went on. It is not surprising that, having learned about their approach, people left their homes and hid somewhere in the vicinity. The play “Devotion to Shao Li” conveys the events of that time. The scene depicts the suburbs of Beijing. The nobleman’s widow, Ms. Shao, enters, supported by her two sons, Shao Hee and Shao Li: they are fleeing from cannibals. Wanting to have a little respite, Shao Li goes to collect brushwood for a fire, and Shao Hee goes in search of roots and berries. However, before he has time to move a hundred steps, a man of a very repulsive appearance, a certain Ma Vao, appears. He states that despite his merits, he was expelled from the army for his ugly appearance and has since become the leader of a detachment of the same outcasts. Now he made it a rule to eat a piece of a human heart or liver three times a day. With these words, he grabs Shao Chi, who diligently listened to him, and drags him to his camp. Convinced that it will not be possible to pity the cannibal, the young man asks to let him go in order to say goodbye to his mother. Ma Wao hesitates, and a philosophical argument ensues between them about the five human virtues. Shao Hee gains the upper hand in the dispute, and Ma Wao lets the victim go to see his mother, with the promise, however, to return in an hour. The young man says goodbye to his mother; her tears cannot keep her son true to his word, he returns to the cannibal camp. His brother Chao Li follows him and tries to persuade Ma Wao to take him instead of his brother. He even gets naked to show how appetizing he is. Touched by brotherly devotion, Ma Wao releases both of them, and they, along with their mother, continue the interrupted path. (The Chinese had “horror literature” (like the detective story) much earlier than the Europeans. In addition to cannibalism, werewolf foxes, the dead who marry the living, ghosts, etc., were a favorite topic. in a word, everything that causes painful curiosity, everything unusual, which does not exist in real life. There are a lot of such stories by the classic of Chinese literature, Pu Songling (Liao Zhai). They are called “Stories about Extraordinary People”.)

Among foreigners, the Arabs and Persians most often wrote about cannibalism in China. But many Chinese gods are for them the center of all vices. And besides, few people in China were treated with such disgust as Muslims. And they paid with the same coin.

The oldest Indian literature contains far fewer references to cannibalism than the Chinese. But it also contains a rather instructive tale from the collection of “Dasakumarakarita” (“Tales of the Ten Princes”).

“A long time ago there was a great drought that lasted twelve years. The fields were deserted, but there was still no rain. The lakes have turned into muddy marshes, the rivers have dried up; almost all berries, fruits and fruits disappeared, and no one celebrated the holidays. Many robbers appeared, people began to eat each other. Human skulls and bones dotted the whole earth. nine0003

Three brothers lived then. They ate all the wheat stores, then all the cows, sheep, maids, servants, children, wives of the elder and middle brother. At last it was decided that the next day it would be the turn of Dhumini, the wife of the younger brother; however, he could not allow this and fled at night, taking her with him…”

In Europe, the situation was no better than in China. In 450 AD such a famine raged in Italy that parents quenched it with their own children. From 695 to 700, a famine continued in England and Ireland and again “people ate each other.” Germany and Bulgaria experienced the horrors of cannibalism in 845 and 851; at 9In 36, the famous famine began in Scotland, when for four years “people devoured each other.” In the second half of the tenth century, one author wrote that “a terrible famine seized the whole Roman world and lasted for five years; there was not a single place in the land of the Holy Empire where people did not fall into the most extreme poverty. Those who died of starvation could not be counted. In many cities and provinces, poverty forced people to eat not only rats and worms, but also the meat of men, women and children. The savagery was so great that many ate their parents. There were many examples of how young men ate their mothers, and those, having forgotten all maternal instincts, ate babies. nine0003

In the so-called “dark ages”, as in all other times, the poorest people were the first to suffer from hunger – and they were not literate and left no testimonies. In addition, there were few cities then, and it was in them that the consequences of want and deprivation turned out to be the most terrifying. Medieval historians limited themselves to remarks like “they ate each other,” because they simply did not have more detailed information.

However, there was one exception. When a monstrous famine broke out in Egypt in 1201, a certain doctor lived in Cairo, who saw a lot, heard even more and wrote it all down. A chapter of his book Instructive Reflections and Reminiscences of the Events I Witnessed in Egypt (published between 1201 and 1207) is devoted entirely to this subject. The memoirs of Abd-al-Latif that was the name of this doctor have not yet been translated, but they deserve to pay close attention to them. nine0003

“In Misra (Egypt) and in Cairo itself, a nearby district, wherever a person directs his steps, writes Abd-al-Latif, it is difficult for him to find a place where corpses, individual ragamuffins do not come across his eyes or under his feet in the last stage of agony, or entire groups of poor people in a similar deplorable state.

In the suburbs and villages, almost all the inhabitants died out… Sometimes a traveler could pass through a whole village and not meet a single soul, only empty houses, open doors, and many decomposed and still fresh corpses. In other houses there were significant valuables, because there was no one to steal them…

…The unfortunate, languishing under the burden of unbearable need, had to eat carrion, corpses, dogs, excrement of people and animals. They went further and reached the stage where they began to eat their own children. It was not unusual for someone on the street to offer to buy a baby, fried or boiled. The ruler of the city ordered that both such sellers and their buyers be burned alive.

I myself saw a fried baby lying in a basket. She was taken to the ruler along with a man and a woman, who turned out to be the father and mother of the child. The governor ordered them to be burned alive. nine0003

When the poor first began to eat human flesh, the rest of the glorious inhabitants were so shocked and horrified that they did not talk about anything else for a long time.

The eating of one’s own kind was so widespread among the poor that it caused the death of most of them. If I told everything that I heard or saw with my own eyes, then many would not believe me. And I witnessed only a small fraction of the horrors that were happening around. Sometimes I myself began to feel that I attach too much importance to how quickly our lives have changed … “

Heretics are accused

“Almost all of Germany is engulfed in flames. In Switzerland, entire villages have been devastated because of them. A traveler who finds himself in Laurens (modern Alsace) can see hundreds and thousands tied to poles along the roads . .. I’m not talking about more distant lands. Alas, it is so — literally everywhere, like worms in a garden, thousands and thousands of witches and sorcerers have bred… Oh, why don’t they unite in one human body so that they can burn it and put an end to the damned demonic offspring forever!” These ardent lines written in 1590 year, are written by the head of the tribunal of the Holy Church in Burgundy, the famous judge Henri Boguyer, who published a guide to conducting witch trials.

It cannot be said that Boguye and his followers were devoutly convinced of the existence of witchcraft: in fact, they never talked about the exclusive omnipotence of Satan and his minions. However, none of them doubted that there are sorcerers and witches, that they harm people, send damage to livestock, sell their souls to the devil and perform dark blasphemous sacraments that are a mockery of the holy sacraments of the Church, and kill newborn babies so that their meat to be eaten during the Sabbath, and the fat to be used in the preparation of magic ointments, suitable both for flying on a broomstick and for poisoning one of their enemies. nine0003

These unfortunate sorcerers who died in public burnings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were accused of cannibalism no less than modern politicians of corruption. In many ways, they have become victims of a long tradition of attributing to a religiously different minority what the majority considers the most disgusting of human vices.

In the second century BC, the Hellenistic king of Syria Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who also belonged to Palestine, offered to sacrifice a pig in the Jerusalem Temple. (Antiochus IV believed that all his subjects should be one people, speak the same Greek language and worship the same gods. Most likely from here his attempts to establish the altar of Zeus and his statue. It is possible, however, that he took revenge on the Jews for the bloody uprising In any case, his act could not but arouse indignation among the Hellenes: even Alexander the Great, whose heir Antiochus considered himself the heir to the kingdom, treated the Jerusalem Temple with emphatic respect. ) This deliberate desecration of the holy place infuriated not only the Jews, but the entire Hellenic world. In order to restore the reputation of the monarch, Antiochus’ close associates composed and distributed a version according to which he met an obese captive Greek in the Temple and he told him that “the Jews have a custom to kidnap foreigners and Greeks, fatten them up for a year, and then lead them into the forest to kill, and sacrifice the flesh, swearing an oath of irreconcilable hostility to all foreigners. Since the Greeks knew almost nothing about Jewish religious practices, this fiction had an effect and served as the basis for the ingrained belief that such ritual murders were actually committed. (To Antiochus Epiphanes, his trick was not in vain: the Jews, led by the brothers Maccabees, defeated the Syrians, expelled them from the country, captured Damascus. The end came to Antiochus, but the seeds sown by him later sprouted. But we will talk about this later.)

The Romans picked up the accusations against religious minorities Christians here and began to diligently propagate the opinion that Christians sacrifice and eat non-Christians. However, in this case, the followers of Jesus were unwilling to turn the other cheek. They unanimously resisted and by the third century launched a wide propaganda not only against their pagan Roman offenders, but also with the blessing of Bishop Clement of Alexandria against all the “heretical” sects known to them. Here is the list of the accused. The Carpocratians eat their children; the same is done by the Manichaeans; the Montanists bake bread from the flour and blood of babies; Gnostics boil and eat human fetuses; and the Euchites gather nine months after their vile sexual orgies and eat the babies conceived on them (Unfortunately, the heretics’ answers to these accusations and their own accusations have not been preserved.). In the first centuries of Christianity, things did not go beyond verbal accusations and curses. nine0003

Centuries passed, and the strengthened Church had the opportunity to begin to fight with even greater zeal against heretics. So, in Orleans in 1022, several people were accused of gathering at night in a secret place and shouting the names of demons by the light of torches.