Erfurt Latrine Disaster of 1184

This is a picture of a Medieval garderobe, which back in the day could refer to a nook outside a castle wall which had a seat for defecating. Everyone needs to go, perhaps at least once a day, and those castle walls were high up. It actually sounds pretty hygienic — except for the fact that the excrement ended up going down the shaft into a moat or a cesspit that was very rarely cleaned. Remember that part of Harry Potter book four where he has a swimming contest in the moat at Hogwarts? Nope: I think the griffins are more likely.

This was a relatively fancy setup, and many stone buildings had other ways to get rid of human waste. (See the bench toilet in the second image.) And this leads me to the topic of the most disgusting accidental mass death in Medieval history: the Erfurt Latrine disaster of 1184, when about sixty aristocrats plunged to their deaths in a pile of shit.

In July that year, the Hohenstaufen King Henry/Heinrich VI arrived at the town of Erfurt, located in modern Germany, to oversee a land dispute between the Archbishop of Mainz and the Landgrave of Thuringia. At this time, this region was part of the Holy Roman Empire, where lands were partitioned among different warlords and the King’s governance of the various elites was played out like a complicated chess game.

And that is why probably over 100 men were gathered at the Church of St. Peter on an upper level floor, making alliances and softening affronts to the honor of various vexed viceroys, when all of the sudden:.

“While (the king) was sitting trying to make peace among them, surrounded by many in a high room, the building suddenly collapsed and many fell in the lower well, some of them laboriously saved, while others suffered in the mud.” Mud here means “shit”.

The weight of the people had crashed through the wooden floor, and then crashed through the latrine floor underneath, and then landed at least sixty people in the deep pile of feces, where they drowned in turds or died from injuries from falling. I would certainly preferred the latter. King Henry VI didn’t fall at all, because he was sitting on a stone alcove near a window, and managed to hold on until being rescued.