The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

If our visitors from space could have revisited the earth at any time between 1450 and 1650, their first impression would have been that things have not changed greatly since the days of ancient Rome. There are still one or two major powers – such as the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor – who dominate most of Europe. The barbarians – the Turks – are still battering at the gates and making inroads. The scene is, admittedly, rather more complex than in the time of Diocletian; but Europe is still a mass of armies marching and countermarching. Christianity, the religion of love and reconciliation, has had no noticeable effect. And perhaps there is no reason why it should, for human nature cannot be expected to change in the course of a thousand years or so. Whole cities are still being wiped out by invading armies, just like Carthage. And there are still plenty of Caligulas and Domitians – men like Sultan Selim I (father of Suleiman the Magnificent), Vlad the Impaler and Ivan the Terrible. In fact, in this respect, mankind seems to have achieved new levels of sadism. Vlad the Impaler – the historical Dracula – was a minor king of Wallachia (now in Rumania), who spent most of his life fighting the Turks, displaying immense bravery and resourcefulness; he was also one of the most appalling monsters in history, deriving tremendous pleasure (undoubtedly sexual) from watching people die slowly. On a lightning raid into Transylvania in 1457, Dracula had his captives – men, women and children – taken back to Wallachia so that he could watch them being impaled – his favourite method of execution. Old woodcuts show the victims impaled through their stomachs, but it seems certain that the wooden stake was driven into the anus or vagina so that the victim’s own weight made him sink down on to it; he gave orders that the end should not be too sharp, so that it would take longer. In a quarrel with Saxon merchants around 1460, he held a mass impalement, and also burned alive four hundred apprentices. The impalements were regarded as an entertainment during meals; one Russian boyar had the misfortune to hold his nose when the smell of blood sickened him; he was immediately impaled on a particularly long stake. Irritated by the number of beggars and sick people in his domains, Vlad invited them all to a banquet, then locked them in and set fire to the building. When he was imprisoned in Hungary for twelve years, and unable to satisfy his taste for torture of prisoners, he tortured animals. He was killed in battle – against the Turks – in 1476, probably by his own men.

Ivan the Terrible – born in 1530 – was a fairly normal Russian tsar – except for a tendency to rape any woman who took his fancy – until the death of his wife, when he was twenty-seven. He then became pathologically suspicious, subject to insane rages and a devotee of cruelty and violence. Here we can see the typical ‘Right Man’ syndrome in its most naked form. When he became convinced that the citizens of Novgorod were planning rebellion – which was almost certainly untrue – he had a wooden wall built round the city to prevent any of the inhabitants from fleeing. Then for five weeks he sat and watched them being tortured to death; husbands and wives were forced to watch each other being tortured; mothers had to watch their babies being ill-treated before themselves being roasted alive. Ivan looked on with insane satisfaction as sixty-four thousand people were killed in this way. But his blood-lust had been sated; when he marched on Pskov to inflict the same punishment, the inhabitants received him on their knees, and he was placated. When he besieged a castle in Livonia, the defenders preferred to blow themselves up with gunpowder rather than fall into his hands.

But as we have seen, the pathology of such cases is relatively simple. A man with a natural ‘spoilt’ temperament is placed in a situation where he can indulge every whim. He could be compared to a glutton who is placed in a situation where he can eat himself to death. Every one of us wants ‘his own way’ as a child, but contact with adult discipline forces us to learn restraint. The Caligulas, Draculas and Ivans are allowed to grow like unpruned trees until they are a tangled mass of overgrown emotions. Their inability to discipline the negative aspect of themselves intensifies their problems. The ego turns into a kind of cancer that consumes them.

Yet fortunately the circumstances that produce these freaks are rare. Most of us are enslaved – and disciplined – by material circumstances from the moment we are born. Our fathers and mothers have to discipline themselves to stay alive, and they make sure that the lesson is passed on to us. The result is that nearly all the ‘monsters’ of history are to be found amongst absolute rulers. They are rare even among the barons and dukes, for people who have daily contact with other people have to learn some kind of restraint. Most of us realise, for example, that to encourage our own anger is one of the lesser forms of self-destruction. Dracula’s contemporary Gilles de Rais is an interesting landmark in the history of crime, for he is one of the first known examples of a man whose political power is limited, yet who developed all the characteristics of the sadistic egoist. But then, he was one of the richest men in France – probably in Europe – and was thoroughly spoilt and pampered as a child. In his twenties – he was born in 1404 – he fought bravely at the side of Joan of Arc and helped to drive the English out of France. Then he went back to his estates and proceeded to spend money with spectacular abandon. He also began to indulge his favourite perversion – the torture and murder of children. His method was to have the children kidnapped, or lured to his castle on some pretext. He would commit sodomy – even with female victims – while strangling the child or cutting off the head. He also enjoyed disembowelling his victims and masturbating on the intestines. Dismembered bodies were then thrown into an unused tower – about fifty bodies were found there after his arrest. Gilles’s downfall came when he beat and imprisoned a priest; he was arrested and tried as a heretic. He had undoubtedly been attempting to practise black magic to repair his fortunes. Threat of excommunication led him to confess, and he was executed – strangled, and then burned – in October 1440. But although Gilles retains a place as one of the first ‘non-political’ monsters in history, his psychology is not really so very different from that of Cesare Borgia. It is again a simple case of the ‘cancerous ego’.

It is this natural tendency of the unconstrained ego to develop criminal tendencies that Christian theologians called ‘original sin’. They saw in it evidence that there is some fundamental weakness -or sickness – in human nature. It also explained why the authority of the Church was necessary. We have seen that the problem can be explained more simply in terms of ‘divided consciousness’, of the fact that man tends to become trapped in his left-brain ego. We have also seen that a great deal of the cruelty in history – for example, of the Romans – was not due to sadism but to an overdeveloped sense of purpose. Like the emperors who built the Great Wall and the great canals of China, they were so obsessed by their purpose that they treated individuals as if they were as unimportant as flies.

All this explains why the kind of crime we find recorded up to the end of the Middle Ages has a curiously non-individual quality. Robbers murder travellers just as a butcher kills cattle; it is a way of making a living. When they are caught, the robbers are executed; but no one bothers to record their deeds. The crimes that the chroniclers feel worth recording are the crimes against authority – treason, conspiracy or coining. Crime on lower social levels is as uninteresting as the activities of rats or fleas.

With the Renaissance, this slowly begins to change, because it is an age of developing individualism. But the individualism only affected the educated classes – and the Church. So it is not surprising to come across a case like that of the priest, Don Niccolo de Pelagati who went in for rape, murder and robbery. He was merely following the lead of the pope himself.

Almost a century after the exploits of Don Niccolo, the Nuremberg public executioner, Master Franz Schmidt, kept a rough diary of the people he executed. A very large number of the entries read simply: ‘A thief hanged’. There are also many women who have killed illegitimate children soon after birth. One maidservant is beheaded simply because she had had children by both the father and son of the house where she worked. But the great majority of the murderers who are executed have committed their crimes in the course of robbery. ‘Elizabeth Rossnerin of Leibsgriien, a day labourer and beggar, who smothered and throttled her companion, also a field worker, and took 4 pounds 9 pfennigs from her. Beheaded with the sword as a favour because she was a poor creature and had a wry neck…’ ‘Frederick Werner of Nuremberg… a murderer and robber who committed three murders and twelve robberies…’ And many of the worst crimes are committed by partners or gangs. ‘Kloss Renckhart of Feylsdorf, a murderer who committed three murders with an associate. First he shot dead his companion, secondly a miller’s man who helped him to attack and plunder a mill by night. The third case was again at a mill, called the Fox Mill, on the mountains, which he attacked at night with a companion. They shot the miller dead, did violence to the miller’s wife and the maid, obliged them to fry some eggs in fat and laid these on the miller’s body, then forced the miller’s wife to join in eating them…’ ‘Niklauss Stiiller of Aydtsfeld… a murderer. With his companions Phila and Gorgla von Sunberg, he committed eight murders. First he shot a horse soldier; secondly he cut open a pregnant woman alive, in whom was a female child; thirdly, he again cut open a pregnant woman in whom was a female child; fourthly he once more cut open a pregnant woman in whom were two male children. Gorgla von Sunberg said they had committed a great sin and that he would take the infants to a priest to be baptised but Phila said he would be himself a priest and baptise them, so he took them by the legs and dashed them to the ground. For these deeds he, Stiiller, was drawn on a sledge at Bamberg, his body torn thrice with red hot tongs, and then he was executed on the wheel.’ But cases like this, involving sadism, are rare. So are sex crimes – not more than half a dozen in twenty-five years. ‘Hans Milliner, a smith, who violated a girl of thirteen years of age, filling her mouth with sand that she might not cry out…’ (Evidently the girl was not killed.) ‘A man beheaded for violating a girl of fourteen.’ Two homosexuals are executed for committing sodomy, and a farm labourer for buggery with cows and a sheep. Apart from the sadism of the robbers, most of the crimes seem to be curiously anonymous; they seem to spring out of circumstances rather than out of a criminal disposition.