Posted on 08/11/2021 7:07:17 AM PDT by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 979, a Saxon lord won a trial by combat at the cost of his head.
You’re not supposed to call this period the “Dark Ages” but it’s fair to say that our sources don’t throw a comprehensive illumination on the story.
Our date’s principal is a count named Gero, possibly/presumably the descendant of one Gero the Great who governed a vast eastern march of the Holy Roman Empire. Famous for his campaigns against the Slavs, the Great Gero is the historical personage behind the “Margrave Gere” character in the Nibelungenlied.
By our Gero’s generation, that vast eastern march had been fragmented into smaller territories, so he carried the same name with nothing like the same political muscle. The man who concerns us was Count of the town of Alsleben, in Saxony, and somehow he made an enemy of a knight named Waldo. What grievance did they have worth fighting about? This is one of those topics left un-lit for us by history, but as we shall see we might be entitled to guess that Gero was the guy in the wrong.
At any rate, the two fought a sanctioned judicial duel on August 11, 979, a date we have via several chroniclers taken by the remarkable event. In the course of the scrap, both antagonists gave like they got, but Waldo having stunned Gero with a blow stepped out of the lists and began unstrapping. We can perhaps picture him, smirking in peppermint-striped armor, pumping his gauntlets … but …
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
Maybe time to revive trial by combat, at least for disputed elections?
It's more probable that Waldo's wound was more serious than apparent and that Otto II took the opportunity to use a legal technicality to get rid of a lower ranking opponent.
In the US, on this day in 2021, ~ 2436 unborn children were executed in the womb.
(and here in the UK: roughly 574).
Yet we refer to the year 979 as the “Dark Ages”.
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