What has it been like to watch the Giants this year?
In 1184, Henry VI, King of Germany, of the royal house of Hohenstaufen, was marching to war in Poland, from his capital in Aachen. His path took him through Erfurt, the capital of Thuringia, which had been unsettled ever since Henry's father, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, had deprived the recalcitrant but powerful duke, Henry the Lion, of many of his holdings. Scrambles to obtain those lands occurred in Saxony, Bavaria, and in Thuringia, where Archbishop Conrad and Landgrave Louis III were squabbling over Conrad's construction of a new castle in a strategically valuable—to Louis, threatening—position. (You don't need to remember any of these names.) With Henry passing through, it made sense for him to try to mediate the conflict.
Henry called a hoftag, an irregular gathering of the nobles under the aegis of a king or a prince (Henry, a king and next in line as Holy Roman Emperor, was both) to settle some specific dispute. In this case, it was on him and the assembly to figure out how to keep Conrad and Louis, both allies, from spilling into open war against each other.
The Petersberg Citadel today is one of the best-preserved medieval fortresses in all of Europe, a formidable bastion set on the city's heights. In 1184, it was home to a Benedictine monastery complex, and it was in one of these buildings—St. Peter's Church, constructed some time earlier in the 12th century, after the original burned down—that Henry held his hoftag.
There were benefits to a newer building. For one, people didn't dump their feces out the window. You can still see garderobes on the exterior of many medieval castles: a small, projecting room with a hole in the floor, that was used in exactly the way you might imagine. These feces just sort of built up at the base of the castle wall; it was unpleasant and unsanitary.
But St. Peter's had been built with the highest of poop luxuries: a latrine pit. These pits were directly beneath a building, but covered over with boards, so they didn't smell. The pits would occasionally be emptied of waste, but this happened infrequently, because it was an expensive job to hire for (for obvious reasons) but mostly because nobles would leave the waste to stew for a time before collecting and selling it as fertilizer. On July 26, 1184, the first day of the hoftag, the latrine pit at St. Peter's was quite full.
So was the second-floor room where the assembly was held. Counts, princes, bishops, prominent citizens of Erfurt, all with their servants, proved too much for the rotted beams supporting the room to handle. Just as the formalities were beginning, the floor suddenly gave way. The great mass of falling men and masonry quickly broke through the ground floor as well. The abbey's own chronicle tells it tersely: "The building suddenly collapsed and many fell into the privy pit below, some of whom were saved with difficulty, while others suffocated in the mud."
King Henry, sitting at the head of the room in a stone alcove, was safe. But scores of others plummeted into the collected excrement in the latrine pit—the "mud," to use the euphemism of the time. Some of the droppings would have been old and dry. Much of it, however, especially with the large hoftag underway, would have been fresh, mucky, pungent. The medieval diet was high in cereals and fiber, so the ordure would have been semi-solid, or even softer, and filled with recognizable seeds and husks. Parasites were rampant at the time; you would have seen them squirming in the ooze.
Johann Jakob Leitzmann, writing in the 19th century when more ruins of the church were visible than today, said that "all of those who were not sitting in the barred windows fell into the depths, many of them were injured, some even lost their lives. Several even fell into a secret room ... [and] suffocated in the most horrible filth."
The imperial register records their names, but we must imagine the horrors. Count Hansteiner of Liechtenstein and Count Friedrich I of Abenberg, wealthy men of noble blood, lying in liquid filth as they were crushed by the weight of falling men. Beringer von Wellingen and the governor Burgrave Friedrich I of Kirchberg, overcome by the foul odors of thousands of pounds of feces. Count Gozmar III of Ziegenhain, all his riches and earthly power suddenly worthless as he choked and drowned in a pool of human shit.
Some 60 lives ended, snuffed out in one sudden and revolting moment: crushed by a mass of bodies, lying in their foul-smelling tomb, their life draining away as their noses and throats fill with excrement. How could Hell be any worse?
Anyway, that's sort of what watching the New York Giants in 2024 was like.
