Abstract
The public execution of criminals was a familiar ritual of early modern European society. This article, however, examines the less frequent practice of ordering that a criminal’s house be ritually demolished following the execution. In many cases, the destroyed house was then replaced by a monument which was intended to simultaneously obliterate and perpetuate the criminal’s memory. Rare as it was, ritual house-destruction was a surprisingly widespread practice, undertaken at various times between 1520 and 1760 in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal and the Netherlands. Though punitive house-destructions had been undertaken in medieval Europe, the practice acquired new overtones in the early modern era. This article examines how and when this striking form of punishment was applied in early modern Europe and considers why authorities would order the destruction of property in order to enshrine the memory of particularly serious crimes.
In December 1594, a dreadful event took place in the reception hall of a palatial building in Paris. 1 An ardently Catholic law student named Jean Chastel – incensed by the fact that the king of France was a man who had once been a Protestant – attacked and wounded King Henry IV with a knife. The would-be assassin was immediately arrested and soon tried by one of the great judicial tribunals of France, the Parlement of Paris. Not surprisingly, the Parlement sentenced to death this man who wanted to murder the king. It is perhaps also not surprising that the death sentence was to be carried out in a particularly brutal form: the criminal was drawn and quartered in front of a crowd of onlookers at the Place de Grève in the heart of Paris. Excruciating punishments in various forms were sadly routine in early modern France and Europe.
In addition, however, the Parlement of Paris ordered something else: it decreed that the home of the Chastel family in Paris was to be razed to the ground. Not a single trace of the structure in which the would-be regicide had lived was to remain in existence. No new building was to be constructed on the site. But a monument was to be erected there, topped by a cross and adorned with Latin inscriptions on all four sides. These inscriptions would explain the absence of a building on this otherwise densely built-up street by recounting the details of Chastel’s crime and punishment. One of the inscriptions was formulated in the voice of the house itself: ‘I, this tall pyramid standing before you, was once Chastel’s house, but the assembled senate ordered me to be utterly demolished as punishment for his crime’. 2
An event like this summons forth a number of questions: Why was it not sufficient to execute the assassin, but necessary also to obliterate the house in which he lived? Why should a valuable building site in the heart of the greatest city in Europe be permanently left vacant? Why should time and money be expended to replace a useful building with a monument to a crime? And was this case unique?
To start with the last question: the answer is no. Tens of thousands of men and women were executed in early modern Europe. The rituals of public execution – the way in which people were hanged, beheaded, burnt or otherwise put to death for real or imagined crimes – have been described and analysed in a huge body of historical literature. 3 One aspect of public execution, however, has been largely overlooked: the fact that sometimes an execution was followed by the ceremonious destruction of the house which had belonged to the criminal or in which the crime had been carried out. And often this act of house-razing was followed by the erection of a monument on the site with an inscription describing the crime and its perpetrator.
The tearing down of a house was, to be sure, an infrequent addition to the familiar rituals of public execution. But what happened in Paris in 1594 took place, in different forms, on numerous occasions in Europe during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – and this punitive house-razing was carried out in widely scattered parts of Europe. Almost thirty episodes can be documented during the early modern era and they took place in Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, Germany and the Netherlands.
House-destruction was not a new punishment. It had been prescribed in many legal codes in medieval Europe – particularly the law codes of specific local communities – and the penalty was not infrequently carried out. But the practice of punitive house-destruction took on a new resonance in the early modern era. In most cases it was now prescribed not by local authorities but rather by state officials or agents of monarchical power, for whom this practice provided another means to visibly demonstrate their authority.
Individual episodes of house-destruction in early modern Europe have long been known to specialists in local or regional history. But no historian has seen these cases as part of a general pattern of criminal punishment during the early modern era. In the 1950s, a German legal scholar offered a useful comprehensive study of punitive house-destruction in central and western Europe during the Middle Ages, emphasizing its widespread presence in law codes and describing many instances when it was actually carried out. 4 But nothing comparable has been undertaken with regard to the continuation of this practice into the early modern era. 5 The objectives of this article are thus easily stated: first to document the existence of this little-noted but geographically widespread phenomenon among the array of punitive practices in early modern Europe and then to address some of the questions which must inevitably arise about the origins and implications of this rare but dramatic ritual of public retribution.
Cases of Punitive House-Destruction in Europe, 1520–1760
We should begin by briefly describing the cases of punitive house-razing identified by this study as having taken place in Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. 6 Even short descriptions of these episodes will demonstrate both the disparate range of circumstances that could trigger this particular form of punishment and the underlying uniformities in the application of this distinctive punitive measure.
Two episodes of house-razing followed the end of the urban uprisings known as the revolt of the comuneros in Castile in 1520–1521. After the comunero leaders lost the battle of Villala to the forces of Charles V in April 1521, royal authority was quickly re-established over most of the cities in Castile – and soon the punishments began. The leader of the revolt in León, Ramir Núñez de Guzmán, had escaped, but the royal authorities ordered that his house be razed down to the foundations. 7 The most prominent leader of the comunero revolt, Juan López de Padilla of Toledo, was already dead – he had been executed the morning after the battle of Villala – but his home town only surrendered to the royalist forces six months later. Early in 1522, the royalist authorities in Toledo ordered that Padilla’s house be razed to the ground. On the site of the house they erected a column with an inscription to remind people of the miseries which Padilla and his compatriots had inflicted on the kingdom of Castile. 8 A few years later Padilla’s brother Gutierre López de Padilla successfully petitioned for the right to inherit his late brother’s property, but one restriction was imposed: the authorities adamantly forbade him to reconstruct the family’s house or remove the column of infamy. For the rest of his life, Gutierre kept petitioning for this restriction to be lifted, but to no avail. 9 Clearly the royal authorities attached great importance to the symbolic message of the razed house.
The collapse of the German Peasant War in 1525 was followed by a wave of repression all over Germany. In the city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, citizens who had supported the revolt were executed right in the marketplace. One of them, the cloth-shearer Kilian Ettschlich, was accused of having hosted conspiratorial meetings in his house. After he was beheaded, his house was torn down and salt was strewn across the site. 10
A number of executions for heresy in sixteenth-century France and Spain were followed by house-razings. In Meaux, just outside Paris, 14 accused Lutherans were burnt at the stake in 1546. One of them was the merchant Estienne Mangin, in whose house Protestant conventicles had taken place. That house was razed to the ground, though a plan to build a Catholic chapel on the site was not carried out. 11 During the auto de fe in Valladolid in May of 1559, Pedro de Cazalla and other members of his family were among those executed for Lutheran beliefs. Their house was torn down, and a pillar was erected on the site with an inscription explaining that the Inquisition had condemned the building ‘since here the Lutherans assembled to hold meetings against our holy Catholic faith and the Church of Rome’. 12 A few months later, two houses were razed in Seville under similar circumstances. 13
In 1559, on the eve of the French Wars of Religion, a royal edict prohibited Protestant conventicles and declared that any houses in which such meetings took place would be razed to the ground. 14 Just a year later this punishment was carried out in southern France. A group of heretics were executed in the city of Valence, and François Marquet, who had served for years as the city’s greffier or registrar, was identified as the group’s leader. His house was razed to the ground, except that the front wall was left standing with an inscription identifying Marquet as the ‘secretaire des seditieux et rebelles’. 15
The most famous case of this epoch, however, involved the ‘Cross of Gastines’ in Paris. In 1569, the brothers Philippe and Richard de Gastines were hanged for having hosted the Protestant Lord’s Supper in Philippe’s house. Shortly thereafter, that house was razed and a massive stone pyramid topped by a cross was erected on the site. The Cross of Gastines quickly became a popular symbol of Catholic triumph. But a year later the Peace of Saint-Germain specified that this and all other monuments celebrating the persecution of Huguenots in Paris were to be torn down. Resistance to this clause among the strongly Catholic majority in Paris was so fierce that the king approved a compromise under which the cross would not be destroyed but would instead be transferred to a cemetery. Yet even this solution provoked serious riots when the transfer was finally carried out under armed guard in December of 1571. 16
A dramatic house-razing due to heresy took place in Madrid in July 1632. At an auto de fe attended by the king himself, Miguel Rodríguez and his wife were burnt at the stake on the charge of holding Jewish services in their home and allegedly whipping the image of Christ. The Inquisition also ordered that the house in which these activities had taken place be destroyed. Once the owner of the house was assured of compensation for his loss, the building was ceremoniously demolished within one day and an inscription was placed on the spot. A convent was later erected on the site. 17
House-destructions for heresy virtually disappeared after the mid-seventeenth century. But there was at least one curious revival. As late as 1747 in the small village of Werthenstein in the Swiss canton of Lucerne, the activities of a Pietist preacher named Jakob Schmidlin came to the attention of the strongly Catholic authorities. Schmidlin was tried, convicted of heresy, and sentenced to death by strangulation, after which his body and his books were burnt at the stake, his house and farm were razed to the ground, and a small stone pillar of infamy was erected on the site. 18
House-razings were also associated with the suppression or punishment of challenges to state authority. Two attempts to assassinate King Henry IV of France – one which failed, one which succeeded – provide dramatic examples of this. One instance has already been described; in that case, as we have seen, the king survived. In the next case, he did not.
In May of 1610, François Ravaillac leapt onto the king’s coach and assassinated Henry IV. Ravaillac’s gruesome execution in the Place de Grève has often been described and depicted. But the sentence also stipulated that the house in Angoulême in which Ravaillac had been born ‘shall be pulled down to the ground, the owner thereof being previously indemnified, and […] no other building shall ever hereafter be erected on the foundation thereof’. 19
In 1568, as part of his attempt to repress the Dutch revolt, the Duke of Alba famously ordered the execution of two leaders of the uprising, the counts of Egmont and Horn. But a third target – Floris van Pallant, count of Culemborg, eluded Alba since he had escaped to Germany. Two years earlier the inaugural banquet of the ‘Beggars’ which signalled the start of the revolt had taken place in Culemborg’s residence in Brussels. On Alba’s orders that building was now razed, the site was strewn with salt, and an elaborate column was erected with inscriptions in four languages condemning the memory of the conspiracy against Philip II. 20
In 1585 a major insurrection broke out in Naples, directed both against the hated Spanish regime and against the local officials who worked with the Iberian overlords. When they had assembled enough troops, the Spanish authorities suppressed the uprising and sentenced over thirty participants to death. Giovan Leonardo Pisano, who was identified as the leader of the rebellion, had managed to escape but his house was torn down in February 1586. A macabre monument was erected on the site of the demolished house: in addition to the customary inscription, it included niches to display the heads and hands of those rebel leaders whom the Spaniards had caught and executed. 21
Beginning in 1612, the city of Frankfurt am Main was the scene of political turmoil as citizens led by the baker Vincenz Fettmilch agitated both against the city council and against the city’s large Jewish population. In 1614 the citizens’ movement seized power, banishing both the council elite and all the Jews of Frankfurt. 22 A few months later Fettmilch was arrested, and in February 1616, during a carefully orchestrated public ceremony, he and six accomplices were executed on the main square of Frankfurt. As soon as Fettmilch was beheaded, two troops of soldiers escorted carpenters to his house, which was ceremoniously razed. 23 A contemporary broadsheet includes a depiction of the house being pulled down by carpenters while the soldiers stand guard (see Figure 1).
Destruction of the house of Vincenz Fettmilch, 1616.
The next year an obelisk was erected on the site of the house with inscriptions in Latin and German which described Fettmilch’s misdeeds and the details of his punishment. 24 A contemporary broadsheet shows the obelisk being examined and discussed by inhabitants of Frankfurt. While most of the crowd consists of young and old Christians, off to the side some Jews (identifiable by the mandatory yellow rings on their cloaks) are also observing the pillar. The Jews had been readmitted to Frankfurt in February 1616, on the very day when Fettmilch and his consorts were executed, and no doubt the fate of their persecutor and his house were of much interest to them (see Figure 2).
The Fettmilch column of infamy in Frankfurt (1617).
Seventy years later a comparable event took place in Cologne. After three years of political agitation, a citizens’ movement led by the ribbon-retailer Nikolaus Gülich seized control of the municipal government in 1683 and ruled Cologne until the old regime was restored two years later. Early in 1686 Gülich was executed and, as in Frankfurt, his house was razed and a memorial column was subsequently erected on the site. The column was topped by a remarkable piece of statuary: a bronze bust of Gülich with a sword of justice emerging from the top of his head. 25
French urban uprisings of the seventeenth century occasionally resulted in house-razings. When the prince of Condé was sent to Aix-en-Provence in 1631 to suppress a revolt against royal authority, he ordered the execution of prominent officials who had spearheaded the uprising. One of the ringleaders was Laurent de Coriolis, the president of a chamber of the Parlement of Aix. Coriolis had escaped from Aix before Condé’s arrival, but his property was confiscated and his mansion in Aix was razed to the ground. 26 In 1659, Aix was again in turmoil with a series of riots directed against the baron d’Oppède, the principal agent of royal power in Provence. Once the crown had regained control, a round of executions took place. The houses of numerous rebels – both some who were caught and some who were sentenced in absentia – were ordered to be razed. 27 Multiple house-razings also took place in Rennes, the capital of Brittany, in 1675. Here what began as a typical anti-tax uprising assumed a graver form when some officials and militia officers began to support the disturbances. Once enough troops were available to restore order, royal authorities instituted the customary executions. In addition, the houses along the entire rue Haute, which was regarded as the epicentre of the uprising, were razed to the ground and the inhabitants banished from the city. 28
In 1628, one of the wealthiest citizens of Genoa, Giulio Cesare Vachero, spearheaded a conspiracy to overthrow the city’s ruling oligarchy and allow the duke of Savoy to take control of Genoa. But the plot was discovered in the nick of time and Vachero and his fellow conspirators were, predictably enough, put on trial and executed. Vachero’s palatial home was demolished and a column of infamy erected on the site. In 1644, some members of Vachero’s family erected an elaborate fountain to partially conceal the humiliating column from public view. Both the column and the fountain are still visible in Genoa today. 29
In 1688–1689, Catalonia was beset by one of the most serious rural uprisings of the seventeenth century. A key leader was the 74-year-old landowner Antoni Soler from the community of Sant Boi de Llobregat. When the authorities began to reassert control, Soler was murdered by his own adopted grandson, who chopped off his grandfather’s head and delivered it to Barcelona in order to collect the promised reward of 500 pounds. Soler’s house was ordered to be razed to the ground and a tablet was erected on the spot to record his infamy. 30
It is clear that house-razing was a punishment normally reserved for cases of heresy or major crimes against the authority of the state. But it was occasionally applied in other instances of criminal behaviour. A well-known case involved the notorious ‘nun of Monza’ in the early seventeenth century. For a number of years, Sister Virginia Maria de Leyva of the convent of Santa Margherita in Monza, just north of Milan, had carried on an affair with Gian Paolo Osio, whose house was conveniently situated right next to the convent. She had even given birth to two children. Only when Osio was implicated in the murder of witnesses who might have testified about the affair did the secular and ecclesiastical authorities institute legal proceedings. Osio escaped from Monza, but his property was confiscated and his house was stripped of its contents. Then in 1608 the governor of Milan ordered that the house be razed to its foundations, and a ‘column of infamy’ topped by a wooden statue of Justice was erected on the site. 31
A few cases of house-razing were associated with executions for witchcraft in Germany. In Esslingen Margaretha Ulmerin, who had abetted her daughter in a complicated swindle involving an alleged virgin pregnancy, was convicted of witchcraft and burnt at the stake in 1551. The house in which mother and daughter had practised their deception was demolished even before Margaretha was executed and wood from the house was used for the pyre on which Margaretha was burnt to death. 32 In 1617 a Catholic priest from Schwäbisch Gmünd was accused of having baptised children in the name of the devil and was executed in Dillingen. His house in Schwäbisch Gmünd was ordered to be razed to the ground ‘so that the abominable memory of this godless priest would all the more quickly be extinguished’. 33
Other reprehensible crimes might also lead to house-razing. In Florence in 1593 two visiting aristocrats from Bologna were assassinated as they were leaving a church. The hired assassins were caught and executed, while some Florentines who were found to have abetted the crime were banished from the city and their houses were torn down. 34 In 1630, during an outbreak of the bubonic plague in Milan, the barber Giacomo Mora and an alleged accomplice were accused and convicted of spreading the disease by disseminating deadly ointments; after both men were tortuously executed, Mora’s house with his workshop was torn down and a column of infamy was erected on the site. 35 In Bautzen in 1670, a woman was tried and beheaded for infanticide. The house in which the child had been killed was razed and a stone was erected on the site to perpetuate the memory of the deed. It is not clear in this case, however, whether the house-razing was judicially ordered or followed the mother’s execution as a form of popular justice. 36
Punitive house-razing was infrequent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and it became even rarer in the eighteenth. But then suddenly in the late 1750s two prominent revivals of the practice – one in France and one in Portugal – took place in connection with two spectacular causes célèbres of the Enlightenment.
In January of 1757, an obscure domestic servant named Robert-François Damiens stabbed King Louis XV as he was entering his carriage in Versailles. The king survived, but Damiens was treated exactly like the assassin of Henry IV a century and a half earlier. The sentence imposed on Damiens prescribed, word for word, the same brutal torments that had been inflicted on Ravaillac, and the subsequent events were also modelled precisely on those of 1610. This included razing the house in which Damiens had been born in the village of La Thieuloye near Arras. Once the current owner had been duly indemnified, the house was systematically demolished before an audience of officials and local dignitaries. The job kept a carpenter and a mason busy for three full days. 37 The barbaric public execution of the wretched Damiens on the Place de Grève in Paris generated much negative comment in Europe of the high Enlightenment. 38 The carefully orchestrated multi-day demolition of his ancestral home seems to have occasioned much less discussion.
Less than two years later, another attempted regicide triggered an even more explosive episode which resulted in extensive punitive house-razing. This was the Távora Affair in Portugal. 39 On 3 September 1758, some ruffians attacked the coach in which King José was returning from a visit to his mistress. The king was only lightly wounded, but his chief minister – Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, known to history as the Marquis of Pombal – quickly pinned the blame for this attack on a powerful clique of nobles centred on the Távora family whose influence he was determined to crush. After mass imprisonments, interrogations personally attended by Pombal, and confessions extracted under torture, six prominent nobles (including one woman) and four conspirators of lower rank were executed with barbaric ferocity on a scaffold just outside Lisbon. The houses associated with each of the executed conspirators were ordered to be demolished. In the case of the most prominent alleged conspirator, the duke of Aveiro, the sentence specified that after he was broken on the wheel, his body burnt, and his ashes thrown into the sea, ‘all his estates real and personal are confiscated, his coat of arms is to be beaten down or erased wherever it is found, his name to be cancelled wherever it is written, all his houses and other edifices to be demolished and razed to the ground, so as not to have the least mark of them left, but the places are to be reduced into fields, and salt scattered on the spot where they stood’. 40 A massive pillar with the customary inscription was erected on the site of his palace and can still be seen in Belém just outside Lisbon (see Figure 3). 41 Comparable sentences were imposed on the nine other conspirators, though it was recognized that those of more modest social station might not actually have owned the houses in which they lived: ‘The houses where they dwelled, supposing them to be their own property, are to be demolished and razed to the ground, and salt scattered upon the spot where they stood’. 42
The Távora column in Belém (Lisbon) as of 2014.
Punitive house-destruction did not completely disappear after 1760. It continued to be applied in the punishment of rebels in the overseas Spanish and Portuguese empires. In fact, this form of punishment had reached the New World soon after the initial Spanish conquests. After Gonzalo Pizarro was executed in 1548 for a rebellion against royal authority, his house in Lima was razed, salt was strewn across the site, and a pillar was erected to warn against any future construction on the spot. 43 In 1566, the home of two prominent brothers who were executed for treason against the Spanish crown was similarly torn down in Mexico City. 44 Two centuries later, when the Spanish rulers of Peru crushed the rebellion led by Túpac Amaru II in 1780–81, the death sentence imposed on Túpac specified that after his brutal execution ‘his houses were to be demolished completely and the sites publicly salted’. 45 Not long afterwards, the same fate awaited the leader of a great uprising against the Portuguese rulers of Brazil: when Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, known as Tiradentes, was executed in 1792, the sentence specified that his home was thereafter to be destroyed, the ground salted and a pillar of infamy erected on the site. 46 And back in Europe, as late as 1797 a startling revival of this practice took place in Italy, when Napoleon Bonaparte ordered the demolition of the house of a priest in Modena who had spearheaded a revolt against the French invasion and the erection of a pyramid on the site to record this punishment of a ‘raving priest who abused his ministry and preached revolt and murder’. 47 But this episode of military law was a rare outlier; the spectacular trials of the late 1750s were in fact the last major episodes of ritualized house-destruction as an extension of criminal punishments in western and central Europe.
The Fate of the Sites and the Columns
Orders for punitive house-razing routinely specified that the site was to be left unbuilt in perpetuity, and if a column was erected it was generally intended to be equally permanent. These stipulations, however, were not always obeyed. In Rothenburg ob der Tauber it took over a century before anyone ventured to construct a new building on the site of Kilian Ettschlich’s demolished house. 48 By contrast, just months after the column of infamy for Gian Paolo Osio was erected in Monza it was secretly torn down – possibly at the instigation of Osio’s own family, which had bitterly protested the confiscation of their house; the governor immediately ordered that the column be reinstalled, but five years later, in response to requests from the family and from the convent, the column was officially removed. 49 In Brussels, the Culemborg monument lasted only eight years. By the terms of the Pacification of Ghent in 1576, all ‘columns, trophies, inscriptions, and effigies erected by the Duke of Alva’ to dishonour or blame participants in the Dutch Revolt were to be pulled down and destroyed. 50 Shortly thereafter the Culemborg column was torn apart by inhabitants of Brussels; many of the participants were said to have taken pieces of the monument home as souvenirs. 51 In 1605 King Henry IV magnanimously allowed the monument erected on the site of the home of his would-be assassin Jean Chastel to be torn down and replaced by a fountain. 52
The macabre monument erected in Naples following the uprising of 1585 lasted scarcely a year; in 1586 the Spanish viceroy ordered that it be torn down. Though ostensibly his decision was in response to popular requests that the shameful display of heads and hands be removed, the viceroy’s enemies claimed that in taking away the heads of the condemned rebels and the monument in which they were displayed the viceroy had ‘done a greater favor to himself than to the people; for otherwise the monument would have perpetuated the memory of the bad government which, after all, had caused the uprising’. 53
The monuments in Frankfurt and Cologne both experienced a complex history. 54 The column on the site of Vincenz Fettmilch’s house lasted for over a century until it was damaged in a fire in 1719. But the pediment remained. In 1772, neighbours requested that the pediment be removed so that a water pump could be installed, but legalistic objections were raised and it was not until the nineteenth century that the last remnants of the pillar disappeared. 55 The end of the Gülich monument in Cologne was far more dramatic. In 1797, while Cologne was occupied by French troops, a group of citizens celebrated their allegiance to the revolutionary cause by first planting a ‘tree of liberty’ in front of the city hall and then, with strong encouragement from the French commandant, marching to the site of the Gülich monument and ceremoniously destroying it. 56 The bust of Gülich atop the monument, however, was carefully preserved so as to honour the memory of this proto-democratic hero. It ultimately found a permanent home in the Cologne city museum.
In other places, too, the stipulation that the site must remain unbuilt was eventually ignored. Though the spectacular palace of the duke of Aveiro in Belém was demolished in 1759 and was replaced by nothing but a single column of infamy, over the course of time buildings sprouted up all over the site. Yet the column remains in place, albeit hemmed in by adjacent buildings on all sides and accessible only by a passageway between two restaurants.
Rationales for Punitive House-Destruction
Why were houses destroyed as part of the ritual of punishment? In fact, house-razing served two purposes, which were, in some ways, inherently contradictory. No doubt the main function of house-razing was admonitory – to make clear the gravity of the crime that had been committed and to draw attention to its consequences. House-razing was part of a repertory of visually dramatic measures which were used to sharpen the impact of public executions – or, in some cases, to symbolically punish criminals who had escaped actual punishment. 57 In cases of grievous wrongdoing it was common to leave the body of a hanged criminal exposed to public view or to display the head or other body parts of the criminal at strategic locations in the community – as, for example, was done with Vincenz Fettmilch and three of his comrades, whose heads were mounted on the tower of the main bridge entering Frankfurt. Yet at the same time the text of judgments which called for houses to be razed sometimes referred to the notion of obliterating the memory of a notorious criminal. There was, of course, an inherent paradox in trying to expunge a person’s memory by taking actions which were likely to draw attention to what he or she had done. 58 To erect a defamatory monument or even just to leave a plot in the midst of a city conspicuously empty was, no doubt, more likely to perpetuate the memory of a criminal’s name and deeds than to obliterate it. But in cases where a criminal act was felt to have been particularly heinous, both impulses were very strong.
But who or what was actually being punished when a house was torn down? In most cases, after all, the miscreant was already dead. But the victims might include the criminal’s surviving family, who had now been deprived of their home. Sometimes the entire family was driven out of the community. In Frankfurt, the widow and children of Vincenz Fettmilch not only lost their house but were banished forever from the city and the surrounding territories. In France, the parents of Ravaillac and the closest relatives of Damiens were banished from the whole kingdom. But even when such extreme measures were not undertaken, unless the family was sufficiently wealthy to own other homes – as was apparently the case for the Osios of Monza – the razing of a house inevitably imposed a severe hardship on the surviving family members.
But what about the house itself? Was it too being ‘punished’ for complicity in the crime? Certainly, there were instances in late medieval and early modern Europe in which physical objects might be regarded as guilty of crime or treason. When Girolamo Savonarola fell from power in Florence in 1498, the bell in the tower of his convent was seized as an accessory to Savonarola’s alleged crimes and formally sentenced to be dragged through the streets of Florence while being flogged with a whip and then banished from the city. 59 There are echoes of this attitude in a handful of cases of house-destruction. The pathetic voice attributed to Chastel’s vanished house on the pillar erected after Chastel’s execution hints vaguely at such a sensibility. But in fact this case conforms more closely to the metaphorical concept of the ‘living house’, which was a frequent trope in early modern Europe. 60 More suggestive was the decision in Esslingen to add beams from Margaretha Ulmerin’s house to the pyre on which she was burnt at the stake. Certainly in cases of heresy, the razing of the house would have been seen as obliterating the very site of an odious religious practice – a point reinforced when a church or cross was erected on the site. But in cases of secular crimes, there is no evidence of any systematic attribution of guilt to the house itself. Indeed, in some cases the house being destroyed was not even the place where the criminal was living when the crime was planned or carried out, but instead the house in which he had been born. In fact, the most common reason for a sentence of house-destruction in secular cases was simply to demonstrate to the public the futility and danger of committing grievous crimes against the power of those invested with political authority.
But did the very act of house-destruction have a religious element? After all, a public execution in early modern Europe almost always had deeply religious overtones: once the culprit was condemned to be executed, he or she was transformed from an evil transgressor into a poor sinner who now deserved the consolations of religion until the execution took place. 61 As for house-razings, those which were undertaken due to the crime of heresy obviously also had a religious subtext. But on the whole, the punitive destruction of a house was a secular ritual. It is perhaps striking that almost all the punitive house-destructions in early modern Europe took place in Catholic countries or under the aegis of Catholic authorities. But this does not make the ritual an inherently Catholic practice; it presumably had more to do with the simple fact that, despite the impact and emotive force of the Protestant Reformation, Europe remained predominantly Catholic between 1550 and 1800: about three-quarters of all Europeans were Catholics in the seventeenth century, 62 and even many Protestants lived in territories ruled by Catholic monarchs.
The Origins and Impact of Punitive House-Destruction
In many ways, when European jurists and officials of the early modern era included house-razing in their repertory of extreme punishments they were simply carrying forward a tradition of legal principle and punitive practice that had existed in western society for centuries. But what, in fact, were the origins of this practice? One source of inspiration for imposing this punishment could have been the ancient Greek and Roman practice of memory sanctions – actions taken to obliterate the images and records concerning notorious political rebels or tyrants. 63 Among these actions could be the destruction of the rebel or tyrant’s house. Some spectacular episodes directed against traitors and or mere political enemies took place in Rome during the last tumultuous century of the Roman Republic; at one point even the house of the illustrious statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero was destroyed. 64 Eventually this practice died out: punitive house-razings like this were no longer undertaken during the Empire. 65 Even so, many Renaissance jurists, steeped as they were in classical law and history, would have been familiar with some famous Roman cases.
Yet jurists and other officials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not have to reach back to Roman models to appropriate the notion of punitive house-razing, as the concept of destroying houses as a form of punishment for serious crimes was widely imbedded in legal codes all over Europe during the Middle Ages. From the twelfth century onward, law codes in territories throughout most of the Holy Roman Empire and many surrounding regions affirmed the right of rulers to destroy castles that were used to harbour criminals or houses in which crimes were being carried out. 66 In some instances, the wording of the law code suggested that the house itself could be considered an accessory to the crime and was thus deserving of punishment – which is why some codes allowed the destruction of a house in which crimes had been committed no matter who owned the premises. 67 Royal and ecclesiastical codes in medieval Spain specified that houses in which heretics had been found were to be torn down and the sites were to be regarded as unfit for human habitation. 68 Municipal law codes in central Europe, the Low Countries, Italy, and the British Isles frequently specified the right to destroy houses under specific circumstances. Typically if a citizen was proscribed or banished for committing a serious crime, his house could be razed – indeed, this was often envisioned as a means to force the law-breaker to vacate the premises and leave the community. 69 But house-razing was also listed in some municipal codes as a punishment for refusal to conform to civic obligations; for example, it could be the penalty for refusing to appear in court. 70 In certain English boroughs, if a citizen was elected as mayor and refused to take office, his house could be demolished. 71 Refusal to perform civic duties could also be punished by house-razing in certain towns in Flanders, the Rhineland and Switzerland. 72 In Italian towns house-razing was prescribed for crimes ranging from heresy and rebellion to debt and, in Florence, pederasty. 73
There were many documented cases of actual house-razing during the Middle Ages, notably in France, the Netherlands and Italy. 74 Such cases must have made a considerable impression on contemporaries, especially when razing a house led to permanent changes in the urban fabric. The great Piazza della Signoria in Florence owes its spacious dimensions in part to the fact that following an uprising in the thirteenth century the houses of the ringleaders were razed and the site was deliberately left unbuilt as a warning to future generations. 75 Following an uprising in Venice in 1310, the houses of two families were wholly or partly razed and doors and windows from these houses were incorporated into prominent nearby buildings. 76 In 1495, the house of a Jewish banker in Mantua was torn down and replaced by a church as punishment for the owner’s having painted over an image of the Madonna which had been on the wall of his house when he bought it. 77
Yet the number of references to punitive house-razing in medieval law codes seems to have been substantially greater than the number of cases in which this penalty was really carried out. Over time the concept of punitive house-razing increasingly gave way to the principle of confiscation of the property concerned. In many cases this happened silently: as law codes were revised or updated in the later Middle Ages, the house-razing clauses often disappeared. 78 But sometimes the laws stayed on the books for centuries; in Bern it was only in 1539 that confiscation formally replaced house-razing as the penalty for refusing to appear before the court. 79 In any case, the fact that house-razing was listed as a penalty for serious crimes in so many medieval law codes must have made the whole concept familiar to countless lawyers, law-makers and officials in early modern Europe.
In general, this form of punishment seems to have been imposed by judges and officials on an ad-hoc basis, drawing on their general awareness that house-razing and the erection of pillars of shame had taken place in the past and might be applicable to a current situation. At the same time, however, though it had been dropped from many law codes, occasionally authorities formally threatened house-destruction on a local basis as the punishment for disobedient behaviour.
Two significant examples of this took place in the duchy of Württemberg in the early sixteenth century. In 1514, following a conflict between the debt-ridden duke of Württemberg and the estates of his duchy, a compact was negotiated to alleviate the dispute. In this ‘treaty of Tübingen’, representatives of the cities of the duchy agreed to take over responsibility for paying the duke’s debts in return for a series of political concessions that would give them more control over the ducal government. Stern clauses of the treaty also threatened any future opposition to the authorities with dire punishments, concluding with the warning that any house or habitation where such evil behaviour had been deliberately proposed or agreed to ‘shall be broken up or burnt and for perpetual memory never again shall anything be built on that same property’ – and in addition to whatever punishment would be imposed on the householder, his wife and children would be banished from the duchy. 80 In the late 1520s, the Austrian authorities who were then ruling the duchy were concerned to stamp out any adherence to the new sect of Anabaptism. An ordinance of 1527 warned that Anabaptists who stubbornly refused to renounce their faith might be burnt at the stake, and the authorities also threatened that houses in which Anabaptist gatherings had taken place might be confiscated, burnt, or torn down. 81 A few months later the authorities modified their threat to indicate that only houses in the countryside in which Anabaptist rituals had been performed were liable to being destroyed, while such houses in cities might be spared. 82 Perhaps urban governments had complained that pulling down houses in a city might damage the neighbouring dwellings. But the concept of house-destruction as a potential punishment was clearly familiar to the authorities who threatened its application.
As late as 1788, the authorities in Antwerp repeated earlier prohibitions on throwing stones from houses and warned sternly that houses from which stones had been hurled would be razed to the ground with cannons. As Daniel Jütte has noted, this was no doubt an empty threat, as the logistics of destroying a single house by cannon-fire in a crowded urban street without affecting the neighbouring structures were hardly practicable. 83 But the edict demonstrates the dogged persistence in elite memory of the concept of house-destruction as a legal instrument.
In central European cities of the Middle Ages, house-destruction was sometimes undertaken to reinforce the banishment of a citizen from his community, making it even clearer that by some crime against his fellow citizens the miscreant had forfeited his right to live among them. 84 In the early modern era, however, it was generally not local governments but the rulers of territorial city-states (notably in Italy) or officials or institutions acting on behalf of monarchical authority who ordained punitive house-destructions. Certainly, this reflected in part the growing reach of centralized legal institutions in early modern Europe. 85 But this was also an era when royal and national governments were increasingly concerned with asserting their sovereignty over the inhabitants of their realm. Obviously, this process varied enormously from one country to the next, and facile generalizations must be avoided. 86 The authority of the Republic of Genoa, for example, was more fragile in the seventeenth century than that of the kingdom of France. But all cases of rebellion or treason, even on the local level, could be seen as challenges to the assertion of territorial, royal or imperial sovereignty, and the destruction of an executed perpetrator’s house could serve as a highly visible way to display the state’s power. The uprisings in the imperial cities of Frankfurt and Cologne in the seventeenth century began merely as protests against the local magistrates – but they soon came to be seen as challenges to the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor and it was, accordingly, commissioners acting in the name of the Emperor who restored order and imposed the punishments, including the razing of the ringleaders’ homes. Thus, house-destructions could supplement other forms of retribution in a strikingly visible way to reify the exercise of state power. It is certainly emblematic that the most spectacular case of house-destruction in early modern Europe – the razing in 1759 of 10 houses in or around Lisbon, including the colossal palace of the duke of Aveiro – formed part of an ambitious statesman’s ruthless suppression of perceived challenges to a royalist programme of absolutist centralization.
Conclusion
Certainly the actual imposition of this penalty in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries remained very rare. Even as more instances come to light, the total number of cases of punitive house-razing in early modern Europe will always be dwarfed by the staggering number of executions and bodily mutilations which were inflicted for crimes large and small. In fact, house-razing as a supplementary punishment was generally reserved for particularly heinous crimes. Furthermore, with the exception of a few cases of multiple house razing, even on occasions when many criminals were executed only one house would be razed – typically the house occupied by the person identified as the ringleader of a rebellion or heretical sect.
No doubt there were practical reasons for this. Tearing down a house was uneconomical. If one simply confiscated the house of a criminal, as was often done, somebody else ended up with the property; by contrast, to destroy a house and declare the site perpetually vacant deprived the state or the community of a valuable asset. It could also create an unsightly blemish in the middle of a city – a point which was recognized at least by the eighteenth century. 87 In many cases, moreover, the house concerned did not actually belong to the criminal. If so, the authorities might have to compensate the owner before tearing it down. At times this concern specifically held the authorities back from carrying out a house-razing they had originally planned. 88 Of course it was possible to remove all the valuables from a house before it was razed. In Cologne, the authorities sold both the building materials and the contents of Nikolaus Gülich’s house before turning the vacant site over for the construction of the memorial column. 89 But even so, tearing down a house represented a substantial loss of real value. This too made it a procedure to be resorted to only in rare cases.
We should also keep in mind that houses were constantly being destroyed in early modern communities. The usual reason was fire. The catastrophe in Frankfurt which damaged the Fettmilch monument in 1719 also destroyed 400 houses – a considerable portion of the city’s housing stock. Between 1500 and 1750, there were over 300 fires in English towns which burnt down 10 houses or more – often many more. 90 The great fire of London in 1666 destroyed, according to a contemporary survey, a total of 13,200 houses located in over 400 streets and courtyards. 91 But fire was not the only reason that houses vanished. Storms, floods, even earthquakes destroyed houses. Warfare also took its toll, when towns were bombarded or, worse yet, sacked after being taken by force. Buildings were routinely demolished when new fortifications were constructed or new neighbourhoods were laid out. It was entirely normal for inhabitants of an early modern town to walk down the street and see a vacant lot where yesterday a house had stood.
But when a space was left vacant as a permanent reminder of how the state punished offenders and asserted its authority, the impression made on passers-by was bound to be much more profound. It was a constant reminder that when individuals challenged authority, the consequences of such actions could go beyond the execution of rebels to the very obliteration of their homes and dispersion of their families. And such a reminder could last for generations. For over a century, inhabitants of Cologne resented the pillar that showed how Nikolaus Gülich’s challenge to the city’s leaders had been crushed, until the French Revolution finally provided an opportunity to destroy the hated monument.
Another factor that made punitive house-razings so memorable was the profoundly ritualistic way in which the decrees were normally implemented. Often the house-razing was conducted as a formal ceremony, with soldiers and officials in attendance as observers. Great pains were also taken with plans for the defamatory monuments erected on the site. In Frankfurt, to cite but one example, there were protracted debates about the exact formulation of the inscriptions to be placed on the Fettmilch monument: the Latin text went through six drafts and the German text through nine before the wording was finally approved. 92
In almost every case when a house was razed, the rebel or heretic concerned was already dead before the demolition began. But the crime was so grievous that death alone could not suffice to make amends. The punishment had to be extended. The very house in which the offender had conspired against the authorities or against God himself had to be eliminated. But far from obliterating the criminal’s memory, this was done in such a way as to preserve an awareness of the crime and its consequences for generations to come. Not oblivion but obloquy was the real objective of this remarkable ritual of retribution in early modern Europe.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am deeply indebted to E. William Monter, Professor Emeritus of History at Northwestern University, who shared my initial curiosity about this topic and alerted me to a number of the cases mentioned in this paper. I am also grateful to numerous historians who have known of my interest in this topic over the years or heard me discuss it at various universities and conferences and raised interesting questions or alerted me to episodes which I had not yet come across. I regret that I cannot name them all, but particular thanks are certainly due to Geoffrey Parker, Roderick Barman, Luc Duerloo, Marco Cavarzere, Stephanie Hanke and Daniel Jütte.
1
For what is described in this and the next two paragraphs, see Roland Mousnier, The Assassination of Henry IV: The Tyrannicide Problem and the Consolidation of the French Absolute Monarchy in the Early Seventeenth Century, Joan Spencer, trans. (London 1973), 217–24.
2
For the text of the four inscriptions, see ibid., 300–309; a picture of the monument is provided in plate 14.
3
The literature on this subject is vast and well known. For an excellent introduction, though it covers only central Europe, see Richard van Dülmen, Theatre of Horror: Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Germany, Elizabeth Neu, trans. (Cambridge 1990).
4
Ernst Fischer, Die Hauszerstörung als strafrechtliche Massnahme im deutschen Mittelalter (Stuttgart 1957). While primarily concerned with central Europe, this study also discussed cases in the Netherlands, France and Italy.
5
Marco Albertoni is currently engaged in a study of columns of infamy erected in Italy between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries; in many cases these columns were erected following a punitive house-destruction. For a foretaste of his forthcoming work, see ‘“Per altrui spavento e per mostrar a tutti in sempiterno”: Considerazioni attorno alle colonne infami nell’Italia moderna’, in Fabiana Ambrosi, Carolina Antonucci and Ida Xoxa, eds, Per un lessico della paura in Europa: Spunti per una riflessione (Rome 2018), 35–46.
6
For a tabular summary of the cases I have identified so far and describe here, see the Appendix.
7
Joseph Pérez, La Revolution des ‘Communidades’ de Castille (1520–1521) (Bordeaux 1970), 588.
8
Ibid., 384.
9
Ibid., 644.
10
Heinrich Wilhelm Bensen, Geschichte des Bauernkrieges in Ostfranken, aus den Quellen bearbeitet (Erlangen 1840), 478–9. Though his work was clearly based on documentary sources, Bensen does not specify the precise source for this episode.
11
A. Carro, Histoire de Meaux et du pays Meldois depuis les premières traces de l’origine de la ville jusqu’au commencement de ce siècle (Meaux/Paris 1865), 204–8, 514; Henry Heller, The Conquest of Poverty: The Calvinist Revolt in Sixteenth-Century France (Leiden 1986), 66–7.
12
Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in Spain, 4 vols (New York 1906–7), 3: 130. Jehan Lhermite, a Flemish attendant of King Philip II, described this pillar as having been visible in Vallalodid as of 1598: Jehan Lhermite, Le Passetemps, Ch. Ruelens, E. Ouverleaux and J. Petit, eds, 2 vols (Antwerp 1890–96; reprinted Geneva 1971), 1: 149–50. Lea, writing in the early twentieth century, remarked that the inscription ‘can still be read’.
13
Lea, History, 3: 130.
14
Penny Roberts, A City in Conflict: Troyes During the French Wars of Religion (Manchester 1996), 58
15
Heller, Conquest of Poverty, 229; André Blanc, La Vie dans le Valentinois sous les Rois de France (de 1500 à 1790) (Paris 1977), 50: the executions were carried out on the authority of commissioners designated by the Parlement of Dauphiné.
16
Barbara B. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (New York 1991), 83–6. Proposals to embellish the base of the pyramid with statues of Justice and Piety were dropped when the transfer of the monument to the cemetery was decreed: ibid., 159.
17
Lea, History, 3: 130–1. See also Jean Antoine (= Juan Antonio) Llorente, The History of the Inquisition in Spain from the Time of its Establishment to the Reign of Ferdinand VII, translator unnamed (London 1826), 503–4, which misprints the date of the event but adds the important detail about the inscription.
18
Aram Mattioli, ‘Kirchengeschichte: Durch göttliche Güte erwürgt’, Die Zeit Online, No. 16 (2001: 11 Apr. 2001, rev. 29 Apr. 2009).
19
Edmund Goldsmid, ed., The Trial of Francis Ravaillac for the Murder of King Henry the Good (Edinburgh 1885), 54. In addition, all of Ravaillac’s possessions were confiscated, his parents were banished from the kingdom, and all his other relatives were commanded to assume a new surname.
20
Peter Arnade, Beggars, Iconoclasts and Civic Patriots: The Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt (Ithaca, NY 2008), 189–90; Magdi Tóth-Ubbens, Verloren Beelden van Miserabele Bedelaars: Leprozen–Armen–Geuzen (Lochem/Ghent 1987), 54–5; H. Schuermans, ‘Le colonne de Culembourg à Bruxelles’, Bulletin des commissions royales d’art et d’archéologie, 9 (1870), 17–107. Schuermans provides detailed documentation about the design and construction of the column.
21
Rosario Villani, ‘Naples: The Insurrection in Naples of 1585’, in Eric Cochrane, ed., The Late Italian Renaissance, 1525–1630 (New York 1970), 305–30; see 323–4.
22
For an overview of these events and a survey of the literature, see Christopher R. Friedrichs, ‘Politics or Pogrom? The Fettmilch Uprising in German and Jewish History’, Central European History, Vol. 19 (1986), 186–228.
23
Although the house was supposed to be demolished in one day, after the upper stories were torn down cracks developed in a neighbouring house, so the removal of the bottom story was postponed for a few days. See Georg Ludwig Kriegk, Geschichte von Frankfurt am Main in ausgewählten Darstellungen (Frankfurt 1871), 397–8.
24
Ibid., 408–9.
25
Bernd Dreher, Vor 300 Jahren – Nikolaus Gülich (Cologne 1986), esp. 79–83. For the full text of the sentence against Gülich, see 94–6.
26
Sharon Kettering, Judicial Politics and Urban Revolt in Seventeenth-Century France: The Parlement of Aix, 1629–1659 (Princeton, NJ 1978), 166.
27
Ibid., 323–4.
28
William Beik, Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: The Culture of Retribution (Cambridge 1997), 169.
29
The basic history of the Vachero conspiracy is summarized in G. B. Malleson, Studies from Genoese History (London 1875), 133–65; a shorter summary which specifically mentions the column is provided by Robert Fletcher, ‘Columns of Infamy’, American Anthropologist, Vol. 14 (1912), 636--42. For pictures of the column and the fountain, see the entry ‘Colonna infame (Genova)’ in the Italian Wikipedia (accessed 28 April 2019).
30
Henry Kamen, Spain in the Later Seventeenth Century, 1665–1700 (London 1980), 216–18. For a few additional details, see idem, ‘A Forgotten Insurrection of the Seventeenth Century: The Catalan Peasant Rising of 1688’, Journal of Modern History, Vol. 49 (1977), 210–30, specifically 226.
31
Mario Mazzucchelli, The Nun of Monza, Evelyn Gendel, trans. (London 1963), 167, 199, 205. This notorious case formed the basis for some chapters in one of the best-known works of Italian literature, I Promessi Sposi by Alessandro Manzoni.
32
The case is described in full in Günter Jerouschek, Die Hexen und ihr Prozess: Die Hexenverfolgung in der Reichsstadt Esslingen (Esslingen 1992), 66–72. Margaretha’s daughter Anna, the ‘swollen virgin of Esslingen’, claimed to have experienced a miraculous perpetual pregnancy which never resulted in a birth. Her condition evoked wide interest and she was the recipient of numerous visits and gifts. Eventually the miraculous pregnancy was exposed as a sham and the mother was tried and executed as a witch for having orchestrated the deception. Anna died in childbirth a few years later in the Esslingen poorhouse.
33
Klaus Graf, ‘Das leckt die Kuh nicht ab: “Zufällige Gedanken” zu Schriftlichkeit und Erinnerungskultur der Strafgerichtsbarkeit’, in Andreas Blauert and Gerd Schwerhoff, eds, Kriminalitätsgeschichte: Beiträge zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der Vormoderne (Konstanz 2000), 245–88, here 270. See also idem, ‘Hexenverfolgung in Schwäbisch Gmünd’, in Sönke Lorenz and Dieter R. Bauer, eds, Hexenverfolgung: Beiträge zur Forschung – unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des südwestdeutschen Raumes (Würzburg 1995), 123–39, here 125; Klaus Jürgen Hermann, ‘Politik, Krieg und Reichsstadt – Strukturen im 17. Jahrhundert’, in: Stadtarchiv Schwäbisch Gmünd, publ., Geschichte der Stadt Schwäbisch Gmünd (Stuttgart 1984), 232–44, here 243.
34
John K. Brackett, Criminal Justice and Crime in Late Renaissance Florence, 1537–1609 (Cambridge 1992), 105.
35
36
Fischer, Hauszerstörung, 42. Because of the ambiguous legal status of this house-razing, it is omitted from the Appendix to this article.
37
Berthe Thelliez, L’Homme qui poignarda Louis XV: Robert-François Damien (1715–1757) (Paris 2002), 122–3, 135. As in the case of Ravaillac, the closest relatives of the assassin were banished from France and other relatives were required to change their surname.
38
Cf. Jayne Mooney, ‘A Tale of Two Regicides’, European Journal of Criminology, Vol. 11 (2014), 228–50, esp. 230–32, 236.
39
For basic overviews of the Távora affair, see Kenneth Maxwell, Pombal: Paradox of the Enlightenment (Cambridge 1995), 79–84, and A. R. Disney, A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, from Beginnings to 1807, 2 vols (Cambridge 2009), 1: 292–8. The texts of the royal decrees and the sentences imposed on the accused conspirators are provided in translation in Christopher Hervey, Letters from Portugal, Spain, Italy and Germany in the years 1759, 1760, and 1761, 3 vols (London 1785), 1: 42–117. Hervey, a British traveller in Portugal during the period when the conspirators were executed, interviewed some eyewitnesses to the executions and transcribed and translated the decrees and sentences.
40
Hervey, Letters, 1: 108–9.
41
The English-language Wikipedia entry for ‘Távora affair’ translates the wording of the plaque as: ‘In this place were razed to the ground and salted the houses of José Mascarenhas, stripped of the honours of Duque de Aveiro and others, convicted by sentence proclaimed in the Supreme Court of Inconfidences on the 12th of January 1759. Brought to Justice as one of the leaders of the most barbarous and execrable upheaval that, on the night of the 3rd of September 1758, was committed against the most royal and sacred person of the Lord Joseph I. On this infamous land nothing may be built for all time’ (Wikipedia, ‘Távora affair’, accessed 24 Sept. 2018).
42
Hervey, Letters, 1: 112.
43
William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Peru, with a Preliminary View of the Civilisation of the Incas, new ed. (London 1867), 421. Gonzalo was a brother of the conquistador Francisco Pizarro.
44
In August 1566, the brothers Gil Ávila González and Alonso Ávila Alvarado were executed for their involvement in an alleged plot against the Spanish royal regime. The sentence specified that following the executions their house was to be destroyed, the site strewn with salt and a sign in large letters was to be erected to describe their crime. For a contemporary report of the sentence, see Juan Suarez de Peralta, Tratado de Descubrimiento de las Indias (Noticias Históricas de Nueva España) (Mexico City 1949), 126–7. See also Anna Lanyon, The New World of Martin Cortes (Crows Nest 2003), 173–4 and 180–1.
45
Lillian Estelle Fisher, The Last Inca Revolt, 1780–1783 (Norman, OK 1966), 223; see also John A. Crow, The Epic of Latin America, 4th ed. (Los Angeles, CA 1992), 407.
46
Kenneth R. Maxwell, Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil and Portugal, 1760–1808 (Cambridge 1973), 198; Autos de Devassa da Inconfidência Mineira, 7 vols (Rio de Janeiro 1936–1938), Vol. 6, 253–7; Vol. 7, 194–7.
47
Andrew Roberts, Napoleon the Great (London 2014), 125.
48
Bensen, Geschichte, 479.
49
Mazzucchelli, Nun of Monza, 205–6, 216.
50
Herbert Rowan, ed., The Low Countries in Early Modern Times (New York 1972), 63.
51
Schuermans, ‘Le colonne de Culembourg’, 29–30. As compensation for the destruction of the Culemborg palace, the estates of Brabant later granted the counts of Culemborg an annuity of 5000 fl. a year which was faithfully paid until 1732, when a final lump-sum payment of 100,000 fl. was made to extinguish the obligation: ibid., 91–2; Tóth-Ubbens, Verloren Beelden, 54.
52
Mousnier, Assassination of Henry IV, 226. The king’s action was part of a broader programme of conciliation in which he permitted the Jesuits, who were blamed for influencing Chastel and had therefore been banished from Paris and other towns, to return to their previous abodes and reopen their schools.
53
Villani, ‘Naples’, 326; the quoted statement was made in a report by the Venetian envoy to Naples, who described this as the viewpoint of the ‘popular party’.
54
A well-contextualized overview of the fate of these two monuments is provided by Robert Jütte, ‘Kommunale Erinnerungskultur und soziales Gedächtnis in der Frühen Neuzeit: Das Gedenken an Bürgeraufstände in Aachen, Frankfurt und Köln’, in Georg Mölich and Gerd Schwerhoff, eds, Köln als Kommunikationszentrum: Studien zur frühneuzeitlichen Stadtgeschichte (Cologne 1999), 453–72.
55
Kriegk, Geschichte, 409–10.
56
Bernd Dreher, ‘Die Beschwörung der Freiheit: Gemeinde vs. Rat 1481/82, 1512/13, 1525, 1680–86’, in Werner Schäfke, ed., Der Name der Freiheit, 1288–1988: Handbuch zur Ausstellung des Kölnischen Stadtmuseums in der Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle Köln, 29.1.1988-1.5.1988 (Cologne 1988), 445–84, here 482–4.
57
In many cities in late medieval Italy, defamatory portraits of culprits who had evaded punishment were painted in prominent locations to ensure that their misdeeds would not be forgotten. See Samuel Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca, NY 1985), esp. 59–125.
58
As noted by Klaus Graf, ‘Das leckt die Kuh nicht ab’, 271–2, and Fischer, Hauszerstörung, 149–50.
59
For a recent interpretation of this well-known episode, see Daniel M. Zolli and Christopher Brown, ‘Bell on Trial: The Struggle for Sound after Savonarola’, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 72 (2019), 54–96.
60
For the widespread expression of this metaphorical concept, see Daniel Jütte, ‘Living Stones: The House as Actor in Early Modern Europe’, Journal of Urban History, Vol. 42 (2016), 659–87.
61
Cf. van Dülmen, Theatre of Horror, 63–65, 118–24; Nicholas Terpstra, ‘Piety and Punishment: The Lay Conforteria and Civic Justice in Sixteenth-Century Bologna’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, Vol. 22 (1991), 679–94.
62
This customary estimate includes Poland but not the Eastern Orthodox populations of Russia, Ukraine and the Balkan region.
63
For a brief overview of this practice in Rome, see Eric R. Varner, Mutilation and Transformation: Damnatio Memoriae and Roman Imperial Portraiture. Monumenta Graeca et Romana, vol. 10 (Leiden, 2004), 1–2. For a summary of memory sanctions in ancient Greece followed by a full treatment of this practice in Rome until the end of the second century CE, see Harriet Flower, The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture (Chapel Hill, NC 2006). Although modern historians often refer to this practice as damnatio memoriae, both Varner and Flower make clear that this term was only coined in the early modern era.
64
Flower, Forgetting, describes the post-mortem destruction of the houses of Marcus Fulvius Flaccus, an ally of Gaius Gracchus, in 121 BCE and of Lucius Appuleius Saturninus, a reformist tribune outlawed by the senate, in 100 BCE (76–7, 81–3). When the warlord Sulla was deposed in 88 BCE, his house was destroyed; when he came back to power he in turn punished his opponents, but instead of destroying their houses he merely confiscated them and sold them for profit to enrich himself or his supporters (86–8, 93). When Cicero fell out of favour and went into exile in 58 BCE, his house was sacked by a mob and then confiscated and torn down by the state; later, however, Cicero returned to Rome and his house was slowly rebuilt for him (102–3).
65
Friedrich Vittinghoff, Der Staatsfeind in der römischen Kaiserzeit: Untersuchungen zur ‘damnatio memoriae’ (Speyer 1936), 13. Flower, Forgetting, chaps 6–9, records numerous applications of memory sanctions in other forms in the first two centuries of the Empire but no cases of house-destruction.
66
Fischer, Hauszerstörung, 20–95.
67
Ibid., 41–3, 152–5.
68
Lea, History, 3: 128–9.
69
Ibid., 95–137, 140–42. See also the discussion of this practice in German cities of the Middle Ages by Hans Planitz, ‘Die deutsche Stadtgemeinde’, in Carl Haase, ed., Die Stadt des Mittelalters, 3 vols (Darmstadt 1976), 2: 55–134, esp. 98–101.
70
Mary Bateson, ed., Borough Customs, 2 vols, Publications of the Selden Society, 18 & 21 (London 1904–1906), 1: 265; Fischer, Hauszerstörung, 122–3, 128–9.
71
Bateson, Borough Customs, 2: 39–40. The towns listing this penalty were Fordwich and Dover as well as Dublin, which was under English control.
72
Fischer, Hauszerstörung, 97, 122–3.
73
Ibid., 142–4.
74
Ibid., 139–40, and Jeroen Deploige, ‘Revolt and the Manipulation of Sacral and Private Space in 12th-Century Laon and Bruges’, in Pieter François, Taina Syrjämaa and Henri Terho, Power and Culture: New Perspectives on Spatiality in European History (Pisa 2008), 89–107, esp. 96–9.
75
Marvin Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art and Power in Early Modern Florence (Cambridge 1997), 92–3.
76
Jütte, ‘Living Stones’, 659.
77
Dana E. Katz, The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (Philadelphia, PA 2008), 41–2. The fact that the owner had previously obtained the permission of the bishop to cover up the image did not spare him from the penalty imposed by the prince.
78
Fischer, Hauszerstörung, 176–8.
79
Ibid., 123.
80
Werner Näf, ed., Herrschaftsverträge des Spätmittelalters. Quellen zur neueren Geschichte, vol. 17 (Bern 1951), 75–6. For a brief history of the Tübinger Vertrag, see F. L. Carsten, Princes and Parliaments in Germany from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford 1959), 9–13.
81
Claus-Peter Clasen Die Wiedertäufer im Herzogtum Württemberg und in benachbarten Herrschaften: Ausbreitung, Geisteswelt und Soziologie (Stuttgart 1965), 4–5.
82
Ibid., 5.
83
Daniel Jütte, ‘Smashed Panes and “Terrible Showers”: Windows, Violence and Honor in the Early Modern City’, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History and Material Culture, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2015), 131–56, here 138–9 and fn. 36.
84
Planitz, ‘Die deutsche Stadtgemeinde’, 98–101.
85
Paul Kléber Monod, The Power of Kings: Monarchy and Religion in Europe, 1589–1715 (New Haven, CT 1999), 306, notes that that by the early eighteenth century ‘communal, feudal, and private forms of justice had given way in most parts of Europe to the authority of royal law courts’. But the chronology of this process differed significantly from one country to another. In France, for example, pressure by the crown to reserve for itself the right to impose capital punishments for serious crimes – and especially political crimes – was already fully evident in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: see Claude Gauvard, Condamner à mort au Moyen Age: Practiques de la peine capitale en France, XIIIe-XVe siècle (Paris 2018), 161–85.
86
For a brief overview of the role of sovereignty in European history, with some useful caveats, see James J. Sheehan, ‘The Problem of Sovereignty in European History’, American Historical Review, Vol. 111 (2006), 1–15.
87
According to a German author in 1779, ‘The demolition and burning of the houses of wrongdoers is a punishment which, since it must fill a city with ruins and empty spaces and render it deformed, has been labelled even by some illustrious rulers of our day as nonsense’. Anon., ‘Anmerkung von einer unbemerkt gebliebenen, in Deutschland üblich gewesenen Strafe der Abbrechung und Verbrennung der Häuser’, Hannoversches Magazin, Vol. 73 (1779), 1153–68, here 1155.
88
See for example Lea, History, 3: 129–30.
89
Dreher, Vor 300 Jahren, 82.
90
E. L. Jones, S. Porter and M. Turner, A Gazetteer of English Urban Fire Disasters, 1500–1900 (Norwich 1984).
91
Walter George Bell, The Great Fire of London in 1666, rev. ed. (London 1951), 174.
92
Kriegk, Geschichte, 409n.