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French royal treasurer Pierre de Remi was hanged on the Montfaucon gibbet on this date in 1328.* A commoner made good, Pierre de Remi ascended, descended, and finally depended with the chance fortunes of his courtly protectors. He couldn’t say that he ought not have seen it coming. As the trusted aide of Louis of Navarre, our Pierre took the helm of the royal treasury after that man ascended the throne as Louis X, upon which occasion the new king executed dad’s faithful treasurer on spurious charges to appease his factional rivals. Death came at this crowd fast, for Pierre...

Greek independence hero Athanasios Diakos died by Ottoman impalement on this date in 1821.* Though he acquired his nickname Diakos (“deacon”) from a youthful spell in a monastery, this fellow Athanasios (English Wikipedia entry | Greek) while the Turks still governed Greece made his way as a klepht — Greece’s version of the Balkan hybrid outlaw/guerrilla archetype, similar to the hajduk figures among the South Slavs. All of these outlaw types took to the mountains where they could subsist as brigands and mercenaries beyond the reach of the Porte, and seek opportunities where they might to strike at Ottomans. Many...

Around the spring of 1290, bad-boy Norwegian nobleman Alv Erlingsson was broken on the wheel by a Danish sheriff. Sometimes remembered as the “last Viking”, Erlinggson (English Wikipedia entry | Norwegian) wasn’t only one of the great lords of the Norse kingdom: he was a prolific pirate. The 1280s saw Norway warring with the rising German merchant cities, the latter soon allied with Denmark. Alv Erlingsson made his sea-dog bones in this conflict, terrorizing Hanseatic League fleets and eventually raiding the Danish coast as well. His “Viking” reputation proceeds not only from this mastery of the waves but from his...

Seattle Times, April 22, 1947. On this date in 1947, U.S. Army Private Garlon Mickles was hanged at a place called “execution gulch” in Honolulu’s Schofield Barracks. Mickles had enlisted three years before, the 16-year-old son of a St. Louis laundress. (“Tell my mother I died like a man,” were his reported words to the chaplain.) According to Associated Press reports, army engineers frustrated peeping eyes by “put[ting] up a smoke screen to shield the gallows from the view of the curious.” He was convicted of raping and robbing a female War Department employee on Guam, where he was stationed...

On this date in 1963, Francisco Franco’s government shot Communist agitator Julian Grimau. Grimau (English Wikipedia entry | Spanish), a member of the Communist Party of Spain‘s Central Committee since 1959, had fled to exile after escaping the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. But he in 1959 he took over the Communists’ activities within Spain itself, and began living underground in his old homeland. The Franco regime dearly wanted to take him. In November 1962, secret police arrested Grimau on a bus and hustled him to Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, where within hours Grimau met with that...

On this date in 1374, mayor Tile von Damm was beheaded by rebel populares in his home city of Braunschweig (Brunswick). One of northern Europe’s great Hanseatic merchant cities, Braunschweig enjoyed a rich history of civic unrest — the Braunschweiger Schichten. (Literally shift, but also carrying the sense of rebellion.) The Great Rebellion in Braunschweig, by Alfred von Schüssler (mid-19th century). One of its most outstanding installments — the one recalled as the Große Schicht — kicked off on April 17, 1374. (Most of the information about this incident is in German, as are most of the links in this...

On this date in 1567, Wilhelm von Grumbach was dismembered along with two of his followers in the marketplace of Gotha. Grumbach (English Wikipedia entry | German) was the cantankerous German instigator of the aptly-named Grumbachsche Handel, a messy clash of rights and prerogatives at the hinge of the old feudal order and centralized princely authority. Grumbach was a knight who’s invariably described as an “adventurer”. As a young man he fought in the Peasants War, but as he headed into middle age he became your basic penniless minor nobleman chafing at the failures and obstructed opportunities life threw at...

French adventurer Bolo Pasha (English Wikipedia entry | French) was shot at Fort Vincennes on this date in 1918 as a World War I German agent. Paul Bolo was his proper name, and a striving, wandering soul was his fatal curse. “A rolling stone that gathered no moss,” says this chronicler of the Great War’s spies, “and for sheer audacity, bold resourcefulness and indifference to fate his career matched, if it did not surpass, the strangest characters depicted by the master pen of Dumas.” He’d spent his youth in Marseilles, and subsequently Lyon, repeatedly going bust in several attempted businesses...

April 16, 1947, was the hanging-date of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. Not to be confused with the Rudolf Hess, the Nazi party defector held by the British in lonely confinement in Spandau until 1987, Höss was true to the swastika from beginning to end. A World War I survivor, our guy joined the right-wing Freikorps paramilitaries and scored NSDAP party number no. 3240 in 1922 — soon thereafter proving a willingness to shed blood for the cause by murdering a teacher suspected of betraying to the French the Nazi martyr figure Albert Leo Schlageter. Höss served only a year in...

On this date in 1560, the son of Renaissance polymath Gerolamo Cardano was beheaded for murdering his — the son’s — wife. While Cardano pere was one of the great intellectuals of his era, and has been covered in these grim annals via his interest in a genius composer executed for sodomy, the fils earns notice merely for his famous relations. The latter, Giambatista Cardano by name, committed nothing but a shabby domestic murder, dosing his wife Brandonia di Seroni — “a worthless, shameless woman” in Gerolamo’s estimation — with arsenic when he had tired of her infidelities. Still, it...

The five ordinary Londoners pictured above had been snitched out by neighbors for shirking the Catholic Mass under Queen Mary — the offense that Protestants would call recusancy when the mitre was on the other bishop. They had the sturdiness one would attribute to men and women of the common clay, and also the theological unsophistication; our martyrology caveats of their interrogation that “some of them attributed the title and honour of a sacrament to the holy estate of matrimony” — the standard Anglican and also Lutheran position was that there were only two sacraments, baptism and eucharist — but...

On this date in 2015, Bangladesh hanged the former assistant secretary-general of the militant Jamaat-e-Islami party, Mohammad Qamaruzzaman. He’d been sentenced for crimes against humanity during the 1971 war of independence that separated Bangladesh — the former “East Pakistan” — from Pakistan; his was just one of several high-profile 2010s prosecutions (and the second execution) by a special tribunal to settle scores from that bloody parting. Jamaat-e-Islami’s party history traces back to the British Raj and versions of it exist in each of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. In the 1971 war, that Islamist party was ferociously anti-independence, collaborating with the...

On this date in 1959, Leonard Shockley was gassed in Maryland. The appeals court that considered his case found it “perfectly clear that Leonard killed the victim in an attempt to perpetrate a robbery or a rape,” during a heist committed jointly with Leonard’s older brother. On that basis, young Shockley achieved the distinction of being the second-last person ever put to death for a crime committed as a 16-year-old. For a very long while, it really looked like he might be the last, but Oklahoma’s 1999 execution of Sean Sellers usurped the claim. While it makes little ethical difference,...

At dawn on this date in 1975, the South Korean dictatorship hanged eight pro-democracy activists, the day after the Korean Supreme Court had approved their spurious conviction as agents of the fictitious “People’s Revolutionary Party”. The eight, Woo Hong-seon, Song Sang-jin, Seo Do-won, Ha Jae-wan, Lee Su-byeong, Kim Yong-won, Doh Ye-jong and Yeo Jeong-nam, were tortured by the Korean CIA into admitting affiliation with this organization supposedly collaborating with the Communist North. They were among numerous opponents of South Korean strongman Park Chung-hee rounded up for protesting against the legal codification of outright dictatorship in the early 1970’s. Early last...

Juan Jose Carrera and Luis Carrera were shot together in Mendoza as traitors on this date 200 years ago. They two of the Hermanos Carrera, a generation of siblings that played a prominent role in the Chilean War of Independence during the 1810s. We have already detailed them through the entry on their more notable brother Jose Miguel Carrera … who would go on to share their fate in 1821. Said Jose Miguel had established a dictatorship in 1811-1812, with his brothers as trusted lieutenants. But Chile’s initial flower of independence from 1810-1814 was crushed by Spanish reconquest thanks in...

On this date in 1979, just days after a referendum overwhelmingly voted revolutionary Iran an Islamic Republic, its former Prime Minister was convicted by a drumhead tribunal in Qasr Prison. Minutes after the trial closed, he was shot to death in a prison courtyard. The western-educated Amir-Abbas Hoveyda (or Hoveida) shimmied up the diplomatic ranks in the 1940s and 1950s, and became Prime Minister after Hassa Ali Mansur was assassinated in 1965. Hoveyda held the office for twelve and a half years, longer than anyone in modern Iranian history. He had been noted as a progressive young statesman interested in...

On this date in 1196, William FitzOsbert was torn from church sanctuary and hanged for one of medieval London’s most famous rebellions. The setting is an England of King Richard I, meaning an England with an absentee king levying heavy taxes on his putative home realm to bankroll his foreign adventures. In reviewing the period’s Pipe Rolls, Doris Stenton remarked that they “give the impression of a country taxed to the limit.” Certainly the laboring classes believed themselves squeezed past dry, for “more frequently than usual,” in the words of the contemporary chronicler Roger of Hoveden, “aids to no small...

A century ago today, a Polish army major had 35 Jews executed in Pinsk. After the devastation of World War I, Poland and now-Soviet Russia fell into war in early 1919 over the oft-trod lands between them. In late March of that year — still the opening weeks of the conflict — the Polish 34th Infantry Regiment commanded by Major Aleksander Narbut-Luczynski captured the town of Pinsk which today lies just on the Belarus side of the Belarus-Ukraine border. This town had seen occupying armies cross it to and fro during the recent bloody years: Germany captured it from Russia...

Six Somali migrant workers were publicly beheaded in Jeddah on this date in 2005 for robbing taxi drivers. The muggings, though violent, were not fatal to the drivers, so the punishment was quite harsh even by the harsh standards of KSA. According to an Amnesty International researcher, the doomed men had not been “informed in advance that their five-year prison sentences, which they had served — and also been lashed — by May 2004, had apparently been changed later to death sentences by a secret procedure.” They were unaware until the morning of their execution that they had even been...

Willem Hugonet and Guy van Brimeu, officials of the collapsing Burgundian polity, were executed in Ghent on this date in 1477 for their failed diplomatic intrigue. This moment fell just weeks after Burgundy itself had received her own fatal blow, at least as far as independent political standing goes: the death in battle on January 5 of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Charles had proven himself an energetically expansionist prince. Charles’s dominions compassed not only Burgundy itself, but a swath of territory running up to Flanders and the Low Countries, a strip that was being squeezed by the rising...