Category Archives: 16th century

1544: Thomas Phaer’s remedies for poor bladder control

Thomas Phaer (also spelled Phaire) was an English physician of the Tudor period. Phaer studied law at Oxford and became an attorney and a Member of Parliament. He also had a lucrative sideline in medical advice and treatments. In 1544, Phaer published The Boke of Chyldren, believed to be the first specialist text on paediatrics.

In this extract, Phaer offers advice on how to deal with bed-wetting and incontinence:

“Old men and children are often times annoyed when their urine issueth out, either in their sleep or waking against their will, having no power to restraint it when it cometh. [To mitigate this] they must avoid all fat meats till the virtue of retention be restored again, and to use these powders in their meats and drinks: Take the windpipe of a cock and pluck it, then burn it to powder and use it twice or thrice a day. The stones [testicles] of a hedgehog, powdered, is of the same virtue. [So is] the claws of a goat, made into powder, drunk or eaten in pottage.”

Source: Thomas Phaer, The Boke of Chlydren (1544). Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1501: Pope Alexander VI likes to watch

alexander vi
Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI

Pope Alexander VI (ruled 1492-1503) was one of the worst-behaved pontiffs in the long history of the Catholic Church.

Alexander was born Rodgrio Borgia in 1431, a member of the powerful Valencian clan that dominated Italian politics during the Renaissance. When his uncle Alfons became Pope Callixtus III in 1455, Borgia entered the church and became a cardinal, despite having a law degree and no clerical or theological training.

Borgia continued to benefit from a string of nepotistic appointments handed down by his powerful uncle. Borgia himself continued this favouritism after he bribed his way to the papacy in 1492 – one of his first moves was to make his 17-year-old son, Cesare, an archbishop.

Alexander VI also had a reputation for sexual excess: he had several mistresses and fathered at least a dozen children, including the notorious Lucretia Borgia. After taking up residence in the Vatican, the new pope – by now in his early 60s and overweight – celebrated by taking a teenaged lover, the noted beauty Giulia Farnese.

According to one of his ceremonial staff, the noted chronicler Johann Burchard, the Vatican occasionally hosted parties that fell away into unrestrained orgies:

“On the last day of October, [the pope’s son] Cesare Borgia arranged a banquet in his chambers in the Vatican with 50 honest prostitutes, who danced after the dinner with those present, at first in their garments, then naked. After dinner, the candelabra were taken from the tables and placed on the floor and chestnuts were strewn around, which the naked prostitutes picked up, creeping on hands and knees between the chandeliers, while the Pope, Cesare and [the pope’s daughter] Lucretia Borgia looked on. Finally prizes were announced for those who could perform the act [of sexual intercourse] most often with the courtesans, such as tunics of silk, shoes, barrets and other things.”

Just a few days later, the pope and his daughter Lucretia entertained themselves by watching papal stallions mate with a farmer’s mares:

“On Monday the 11th of November, a peasant leading two mares laden with wood entered the city. When they arrived in the place of St. Peter the Pope’s men ran towards them, cut the saddle bands and ropes, threw down the wood and led the mares to a small place inside the palace… There four stallions, freed from reins and bridles, were sent from the palace. They ran after the mares and with a great struggle and noise, fighting with tooth and hoof, jumped upon the mares and mated with them, tearing and hurting them severely. The Pope stood together with Lucretia under a window… both looked down at what was going on there with loud laughter and much pleasure.”

Source: Chronicles of Johann Burchard, Ceremoniere to Pope Alexander VI, 1501. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1524: Spanish boy invites cartographers to chart his backside

In 1494, Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, effectively dividing the rest of the uncolonised world between them. But the treaty only covered the Atlantic hemisphere, so by the 1510s, Spanish and Portuguese explorers and colonists were again clashing, this time in Indonesia and the Philippines.

In 1524, both powers convened more treaty negotiations to divide the other side of the world. These meetings, held in the border towns of Badajoz and Elvas, were attended by some of the most notable diplomats, cartographers, astronomers and mathematicians of the age.

Leading the delegation from Lisbon was Diego Lopes de Sequeira, a prominent military leader and a former governor of Portuguese Goa. According to a contemporary report, Lopes and his advisors took a break from the negotiations and went walking along the banks of the Quadiana river. On the Spanish side of the river they saw:

“…a boy who stood keeping his mother’s clothes which she had washed… [The boy] demanded of them whether they were those men who were partitioning the world [on behalf of] the emperor. And as they answered ‘Yea’, he took up his shirt and showed them his bare arse, saying: ‘Come and draw your line through the middle [of this].’ This saying was afterward in every man’s mouth and laughed at in the town of Badajoz.”

The negotiations ended with the Treaty of Zaragoza which, in general terms, handed Portugal colonial rights over the Asian mainland, while Spain was given access to islands in the Pacific.

Source: Richard Eden, The Decades of the Newe Worlde, London, 1555. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1511: Belgians amuse themselves with pornographic snowmen

From New Year’s Eve 1510, the city of Brussels was frozen by more than six weeks of sub-zero temperatures and constant snow. In a city with high levels of poverty, this prolonged cold snap caused considerable human suffering, leading some to dub it the ‘Winter of Death’.

Those able to stay warm made the most of things by engaging in a spontaneous snowman competition. All across Brussels, life-sized snowmen began to appear in parks, on street corners and outside private homes. One contemporary report suggests at least 50 clusters of snow figures could be observed in various places around the city.

By all accounts, most of these snowmen were cleverly sculpted and quite realistic. Some may even have been created by prominent artists. Among the figures represented in snow were Jesus Christ, Adam and Eve and other Biblical figures, Roman deities, Saint George and the dragon, unicorns and several signs of the Zodiac.

In the city’s working-class areas, however, the majority of the snow figures were pornographic or scatological. Near the city fountain, a snow couple fornicated while another snow figure watched with a visible erection. A number of snow women, ranging from nuns to prostitutes, appeared in various states of undress. Near the city market, a snow boy urinated into the mouth of another. A snow cow could be seen, halfway through defecation, while a snow drunk lay amongst his own snowy excrement.

The poet Jan Smeken, who penned the best-known account of the Belgian snow figures, described one scene of implied bestiality:

“In the Rosendal, a wonder was to be seen: a huge plump woman, completely naked, her buttocks like a barrel and her breasts finely formed. A dog was ensconced between her legs, her pudenda covered by a rose…”

The snowmen of Brussels lasted for about six weeks, until the return of warmer weather in mid-February.

Source: Jan Smeken, The Pure Wonder of Ice and Snow, 1511. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1559: Fainting Belgian brought round with smoking horse dung

Writing in 1559, the Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius claimed that those who lived constantly among the foulest smells were weakened and nauseated by perfumes and other sweet scents. He offered an example of this olfactory reversal:

“Those are made to empty jakes [toilets] and make clean sinks… these men reject all sweet smells as offensive unto them.”

Lemnius also wrote that these people, when overcome by sweet smells, could be brought back into a state of sensibility by waving contrasting smells – such as bitumen or burnt goat’s hair – under their noses:

“A certain countryman at Antwerp was an example of this, who when he came into a shop of sweet smells [a perfumery] he began to faint, but one presently clapped some fresh smoking warm horse dung to his nose, and fetched [roused] him again.”

The Scottish writer Tobias Smollett repeated the principle in 1769 when he wrote that:

“A citizen of Edinburgh stops his nose when he passes by the shop of a perfumer.”

Source: Levinus Lemnius, The Secret Miracles of Nature, Book II, 1559; Tobias Smollett, The History and Adventures of an Atom, 1769. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1590: Just another altercation between London neighbours

In the spring of 1590, Sicilia Thornton of Clerkenwell sued her neighbour, Edith Parsons, for “uttering the lewdest of slanders” . According to a witness, Joanna Gage, Parsons leaned out of her window and screamed a tirade of abuse at Thornton, who was standing in her own doorway.

Some of the words uttered, Gage said, were “past womanhood to name”, however she recalled hearing Parsons shout:

“Thou art a whore, an arrant whore, a bitch… yea, worse than a bitch, thou goes sorting up and down the town after knaves… and thou art such a hot-tailed whore that neither one nor two nor 10 nor 20 knaves will scarce serve thee.”

The court found in Parsons’ favour, however no penalty against Thornton is recorded.

Source: Depositions of London Consistory Court, May 21st 1590, 213. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1509: Machiavelli throws up over ugly prostitute

A pensive and perhaps regretful Machiavelli

In late 1509, the political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli, future author of The Prince, had a disturbing sexual encounter with a prostitute in Lombardy. He later described this incident in a letter to his good friend Luigi Guicciardini.

According to Machiavelli, he was “very horny without [his] wife” and was lured into the home of a washerwoman. Once inside she offered him the services of a woman with “a towel over her head and face”:

“I was now completely terrified, however since I was alone with her in the dark, I gave her a good hump. Even though I found her thighs flabby, her genitals greasy and her breath stinking a bit, my lust was so desperate that I went ahead and gave it to her anyway.”

When their liaison was over, Machiavelli managed to find a lamp and was able to shine a light on the woman:

“My God, she was so ugly that I almost dropped dead… a tuft of hair, half white and half black, the top of her head was bald which allowed you to see several lice taking a stroll… Her eyebrows were full of nits; one eye looked down and the other up. Her tear ducts were full of mucus… her nose was twisted into a peculiar shape, the nostrils were full of snot and one of them was half missing. Her mouth looked like Lorenzo de Medici’s, twisted on one side and drooling since she had no teeth to keep the saliva in her mouth. Her lip was covered with a thin but rather long moustache…”

When the woman spoke to him, Machiavelli was struck by her “stinking breath” and:

“…heaved so much that I vomited all over her.”

Letter from Machiavelli to Guicciardini, December 9th 1509. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1529: Silver rings help pilgrims deal with erectile problems

In the late 1520s, Sir Thomas More penned a defence of the Catholic church that also included a condemnation of obscure and superstitious rituals being practised in some areas.

One of the sillier examples described by Sir Thomas occurred at an abbey in Picardy, near the mouth of the Somme. The abbey, dedicated to St Valery, had become a shrine for men suffering from kidney stones, impotence and erectile problems. It attracted visitors from across western Europe, including some from England.

Seeking the blessings of St Valery, these pilgrims sometimes left offerings peculiar to their impairment:

“..Just as you see wax legs or arms or other parts hanging up at other pilgrimage shrines, in that chapel all the pilgrims’ offerings hung about the walls, and they were all men’s and women’s private gear [genitalia] made out of wax.”

More also describes a particular ritual carried out at the abbey, apparently intended to help pilgrims with their impotence and erectile problems:

“At the end of the altar there were two round rings of silver, one much larger than the other, through which every man puts his privy member, not every man through both… for they were not of the same size but one larger than the other.”

Source: Sir Thomas More, Dialogue concerning Heresies, 1529. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1582: Live cats feature in Bruges fireworks show

William, Prince of Orange and Francis, Duke of Anjou visited Bruges in July 1582. According to contemporary reports, cited in later texts, William and Francis were officially welcomed to the city with a “grand display” of banners, bunting and displays. The highlight of the royal reception was a giant structure in the city square, built in the form of a ship and packed with fireworks. And strapped to poles beneath or alongside these fireworks were more than three dozen cats:

“The screams of the hapless creatures on the ignition of each firework produced further cheers and merriment among the happy throng.”

When all the fireworks had been detonated, the entire ship – with the cats still inside – was set alight.

Source: Various inc. Gouw, De Volksvermaken, 1871. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1561: Man suffers from glass buttocks delusion

In 1561, the Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius published an account of ailments and disorders of the human body. He devoted one chapter to mental illnesses, including the notorious ‘glass delusion’: a form of madness where the patient believed their body, or parts thereof, to be made of glass.

According to Lemnius, one of his patients believed:

“..his buttocks were made of glass, in so much as he darest not do anything [not] standing, for fear that if he should sit, he should break his rump and the glass might fly into pieces… This included the business of sitting down in privies for to relieve himself, the commission of which caused him great peril…”

The highest profile sufferer was French king Charles VI (reigned 1380-1422), who had intermittent episodes where he believed his entire body to be composed of glass.

Source: Dr Levinus Lemnius, De Habitu et Constitutione Corpori, 1561. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.