Cannibals

by Ray Black

  The Peasants’ Crusade

  Following Pope Urban II’s call for a crusade, Peter the Hermit and a knight called Walter the Penniless led a group that rushed ahead of the official expedition. They were just one of the many. This group became known as the ‘Peasants’ Crusade’ – a band of untrained and undisciplined men. As this motley crew travelled through eastern Europe towards Byzantium, demanding free food and shelter, they slaughtered thousands of people on their way. Wherever they journeyed they left their mark of violence and cruelty. They fell upon the defenceless Jews, murdering thousands in the German towns. Many of Peter’s men died before they even reached Asia, while many more were sold as slaves to pay for food. In the end only 7,000 managed to reach Asiatic soil. When they did finally meet the Turks in Nicaea, the ensuing battle was a mismatch. The Christian army was totally routed. About 4,000 of them were killed in the battle. All in all, a total of 300,000 Christians died during this march led by Peter the Hermit.

  On the other hand, the force that followed were a far more organized band, led by Godfrey of Bouillon, Raymond of Toulouse, Robert of Flanders, and Bohemond of Taranto. Godfrey of Bouillon alone led a host of 700,000 crusaders. This combined army successfully defeated the Turks at Dorylaeum in 1097, Antioch was captured in 1098, and Jerusalem fell in 1099, thus founding the Christian kingdom of Palestine.

  However, while the military campaign was a success, the behaviour of the Christian army certainly did not win them any new converts. When the crusaders were attacking Antioch in northern Syria, they used the heads of slain Turks as ammunition for their primitive cannons. Apart from using the heads as ammunition, about 300 heads were placed on stakes in front of the city to demoralize the defenders of the city. The crusaders finally broke through and slaughtered all the inhabitants. This was possibly the most difficult, and most remembered battle, and it was here that 10,000 or more, were massacred on the first night. After Antioch had been captured, the Crusaders encountered the Turks once more and by the evening of July 3, 1098, the entire city was smeared with blood. Every single Turk was killed. The corpses were left lying where they died, and it wasn’t long before the plague caused by the decomposition, killed many more.

  Mayhem and desperation ensued, and soon those who were left standing resorted to robbery, rape, and spent their time in a state of constant drunkenness. Then came the inevitable – famine. The crusaders had devastated so much of the country that they even had to resort to eating their own horses, reducing the cavalry from 100,000 to 2,000. Then, when the supply of horsemeat ran out, they resorted to cannibalism.

  Their behaviour was even worse during the siege of Marra, where they butchered all the inhabitants, eating their flesh. Pagan adults were boiled in cooking pots, while their children were impaled on spits and consumed after they were grilled over an open fire. The massacre and carnage was seen by many, and there were numerous eye-witness accounts to preserve their evil-doing in the history books.

  The crusaders arrived in Jerusalem in the summer of 1099, and recovered the Holy City after six weeks of fighting. Once again the streets ran with blood and the Jews were burned in their synagogue. Ten thousand people perished in the mosque of Omar alone. The old and sick were among the first to meet their grisly end, their bodies were slashed open in search of gold coins they could have swallowed. They were ruthless because the Pope had decreed that any spoils of war were possessions the Christians could keep – and the Christians were greedy. Seventy thousand Muslim inhabitants including men, women, and children where slaughtered. Records show how children were dismembered, babies were put on spits and roasted alive, and then consumed by the voracious crusaders.

  It was impossible to look anywhere without seeing the fragments of human bodies, and the ground covered with the blood of the slain. However, as if the spectacle of headless bodies and mutilated limbs strewn in all directions was not bad enough, still more dreadful was the sight of the victors themselves, dripping with blood from head to foot, licking their lips after a meal of human flesh. An estimated one million victims died during the First Crusade, and it is certainly one worthy of being mentioned when it comes to the atrocities of cannibalism.

  The Marquis de Sade

  The term ‘sadism’ is derived from the name of a French author who lived from 1740 to 1814, Donatien Alphonse François comte de Sade, better known as the Marquis de Sade

  Sexual cannibalism is thought to be a psychosexual disorder, which involves a person sexualizing the consumption of another person’s flesh. In simple terms the cannibal does not achieve sexual satisfaction purely from the eating of human flesh, but may also release his frustrations and pent-up anger in other ways. Sexual cannibalism is considered to be a form of sexual sadism and is often associated with the act of necrophilia (sex with corpses). There have been several high profile cases, which have involved sexual cannibalism, including that of Andrei Chikatilo, Edward Gein, Albert Fish, Armin Meiwes and Jeffrey Dahmer, but this story goes back much further to the 1700s.

  Donatien Alphonse François comte de Sade was born into nobility in 1740. He was an extremely spoilt child and was raised in various country estates. One of these estates was a remote castle which contained a dank, and dark dungeon, and possibly contributed to the young Donatien’s developing psyche. Added to this he attended Catholic school where the pupils were subject to much mental abuse, along with public whippings which were part of the Jesuit daily routine.

  It was fair to say that the young boy was already starting to form some very strange characteristics even before he reached manhood.

  At the age of 14, Donatien enlisted in the Army and experienced his first real combat in the Seven Years War. The young Donatien did not interact well with the other soldiers, although he did manage to achieve the rank of Captain by virtue of his bloodline. When the war was over he returned to Paris, and immediately enjoyed the privileges which were available to him – the demon drink and female company – which he had previously been denied. A virulent young man he gradually worked his way through the majority of the young female population of the city. When questioned about his somewhat outrageous behaviour the young Marquis simply shrugged his shoulders and said that it was what every healthy young male indulged in.

  However his behaviour had not gone unnoticed by his family, and in 1763 he was forced into an arranged marriage with a woman called Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil, the homely daughter of a rich Paris judge. Although she had only met the Marquis several days before the actual ceremony, Montreuil proved to be a loving and devoted wife, especially in the light of his forthcoming activities.

  Unfortunately marriage did nothing to curb the Marquis’ activities with the working women of the Paris streets. He loved the company of the opposite sex, but it didn’t just stop there. Not satisfied with normal sexual practices, he got his thrills from the excitement of orgies, blasphemy and subversion, in whatever way he could get them. So it was hardly surprising that, within months of his marriage, the Marquis de Sade was arrested for combining all of these pleasures. He had invited a prostitute back to his house for what she assumed would be the normal practice, but this soon developed into something far more sordid.

  Although his loving wife was prepared to turn a blind eye to his activities, the authorities were not and the Marquis served what was to be the first of many stays in prison. However, thanks to the influence of his family, the incarceration lasted only three weeks. His mother-in-law, Mme. de Montreuil, was a shrewd woman who knew how to handle the judicial bureaucracy. Charmed by her son-in-law, she defended him to his blood relatives and assured them that he would reform soon. He was released after a short incarceration but was exiled to stay outside of Paris, and he was told that he would be kept under close surveillance. This did not deter the Marquis and before long he had returned to his old sordid ways of debauchery.

  Over the next few years the Marquis managed to stay out of any major scandal, and satisfied himself with having an affair with his wife’s
sister. He managed to compile a massive library of pornography, some of which included priests, nuns and monks engaged in various sexual activities.

  For the next 15 years the incorrigible de Sade spread his family’s shame ever wider and made his own legal situation even worse. On Easter Sunday in 1768 he pretended to hire a woman as a housekeeper; then, after threatening to murder her and bury her in the garden he whipped her and poured hot wax into the lacerations on her back.

  Four years later, in Marseilles, he organized a bisexual orgy with his valet, and fed two prostitutes an overdose of Spanish fly* that earned him a conviction for both sodomy and poisoning, but as the authorities were unable to catch him they merely decapitated and burned him in effigy form. Undaunted, after more than two years as a fugitive in France and abroad, the Marquis took five adolescent girls and a boy to his ancestral home of La Coste for a winter of orgies, having them held captive until the marks on their bodies had healed. It was not until August of 1778, following a shooting attempt by the father of one of the adolescents, another arrest, and an escape, that the Marquis de Sade was eventually trapped. He spent the next 12 years behind bars.

  During de Sade’s 12-year stretch in prison, first in Vincennes and later in the Bastille, his wife bore the brunt of his insults, and she still stuck by him lovingly. She kept him supplied with books, sweets, tailor-made clothes, and the enormous bespoke wooden dildos – which he stipulated had to be made by the same craftsman who supplied the archbishop of Lyons – with which he consoled himself for the lack of sexual partners.

  Removed from the world as punishment for his crimes, the Marquis de Sade turned to writing, the result of which would offend society far more than anything else he had done. He continued writing novels and plays and grew more and more crazy as the years went by.

  The Marquis de Sade died peacefully in his sleep in 1814, at the age of 74. He will be remembered for his crimes of cannibalism, coprophagy, necrophilia, the rape and murder of children, and countless other perversions. In all, he spent 28 of his 74 years in confinement.

  Napoleon’s March on Moscow

  Around 400,000 men set out one midsummer’s day in the year 1812, but not one of them could have imagined the terrors and hardships they were about to endure

  This was possibly one of the greatest disasters in military history. The story really begins with the birth of Napoleon’s heir, the king of Rome, in March 1811. Paris was in a state of celebration because they assumed, albeit wrongly, that the establishment of a dynasty would bring the long awaited peace. But they couldn’t have been more wrong, because Napoleon would not be happy until he was master of all the capitals of Europe.

  In June of 1812, Napoleon began his fatal Russian campaign. The majority of continental Europe was already under his control, and the invasion of Russia was an attempt to force Tsar Alexander I to submit once again to the terms of a treaty that Napoleon had imposed upon him four years earlier.

  Having gathered nearly 400,000 soldiers, from France and Europe, Napoleon entered Russia leading one of the largest armies ever seen.

  The Russians, led by Marshal Kutuzov, knew they could not defeat this enormous army with direct confrontation, so they planned a strategic defensive campaign. Instead of advancing towards Napoleon’s army they retreated, devastating the land as they went, which caused havoc in the flanks of the French soldiers. Due to the large number of men and the fact that the Russians had made sure they could not get their hands on any further supplies, Napoleon’s men started to decline through lack of nourishment. By September, without having even fought one single battle, the French army had been reduced by more than two thirds from fatigue, starvation, desertion and raids carried out by the Russian forces.

  Despite their reduced numbers and strength, Marshal Kutuzov knew that unless his army engaged the French in a major battle, Napoleon would take control of Moscow within a couple of weeks. The first confrontation took place on September 7 at Borodino Field. The outcome of the battle was favourable for the Russian army, who had 104,000 men and 627 guns. The French had 124,000 men and 587 guns. The casualties in Napoleon’s army ran as high as over 50,000 dead and wounded (28,000 killed), the Russian casualty figures stood at 44,000. The Battle of Borodino heralded a crisis in Napoleon’s strategic plan to overcome Moscow. Napoleon failed to totally destroy the Russian army, or indeed make Russia surrender, and the day ended with neither side gaining a decisive victory. Kutuzov, realizing that any further defence of the city would be senseless, withdrew his forces, prompting the citizens of Moscow to begin a massive and panicked exodus.

  When Napoleon’s army arrived on September 14, they found a city bereft of both people and supplies, which did nothing to lift their spirits due to the onset of winter. To make matters much worse, fires broke out in the city that night, and by the next day the French were lacking shelter as well.

  Napoleon waited in vain in Moscow for Tsar Alexander to offer some form of negotiation. Eventually in a state of desperation he ordered his troops to start their march home. Unable to take the easier route south, because this way was blocked by Kutuzov’s forces, the French were forced to retrace the long route of the invasion. Having waited until mid-October to leave Moscow, the troops found themselves in the middle of an early and especially cold winter. The temperatures soon dropped below freezing, food was almost non-existent, and the march ahead of them was over 500 miles.

  The diminishing band of survivors resorted to cutting chunks of meat out of the living flesh of their horses, who were so numbed by the cold felt very little pain. The one thing the men looked forward to at night as they set up camp was to slit open the stomach of a horse and eat the heart and liver whilst it was still warm. These once proud soldiers had been reduced to desperate men who finally resorted to cannibalism.

  By early December the weather had worsened and the temperature dropped as low as –36°C. By now the men had been reduced to nothing more than savage beasts in an effort to survive. They were quite prepared to kill each other to obtain the coat off a soldier who had died en route, or fight for a piece of fresh meat.

  The last lap of their long trek back to Vilnius was the worst part of all. The weakened soldiers had to cross the Berezina River over two extremely frail bridges, and many of the half-dead men waded through icy water to get across. One by one the men dropped like flies into the snow.

  Some of the soldiers simply refused to go on, or were captured by the Cossacks, who had harried them throughout their retreat, and had starved the army to death by keeping it to one narrow highway. These prisoners were driven naked all the way back again into Russia.

  Finally, the stunned, frozen and starving survivors of Napoleon’s Grand Army staggered into Vilnius. There were around 20,000 soldiers remaining of the 400,000 who had originally marched into Russia at the height of summer. They were supposed to rejoin Napoleon, but he had already gone ahead to Paris to give the news of the catastrophe, and to raise new armies. Men could easily be replaced, but not horses. Tens of thousands of soldiers had died in Russia, but it was because of his lack of cavalry that Napoleon was eventually defeated by Austria, Prussia, Sweden and Russia, in 1813.

  Dorangel Vargas

  An alleged cannibal in Venezuela last month dished up his favourite recipes of eyeball soup and tongue stew

  For a country with hardly any history of serial killers, for Venezuela to have a self-confessed cannibal is something that stunned the local press. Dorangel Vargas, dubbed the ‘Hannibal Lecter of the Andes’ by the local press, claims to have eaten up to ten men in the last two years. He was arrested in February, 1999, in the city of San Cristobal, near to the Colombian border.

  Vargas was arrested after police found human remains lying around his home. As they continued the search of his house they turned up more and more gruesome discoveries. More and more human skulls were found and they even stumbled across some fresh entrails. The police were horrified and even more astonishing was that after his arrest Vargas star
ted openly talking about his obsession, without any feeling of guilt.

  ‘Sure I eat people,’ the candid cannibal told reporters. ‘Anyone can eat human flesh, but you have to wash and garnish it well to avoid diseases . . . I only eat the parts with muscles, particularly thighs and calves which are my favourite . . . I make a very tasty stew with the tongue and I use the eyes to make a nutritious and healthy soup.’ When questioned, Vargas told his interrogators that he preferred the taste of men to women and will not eat hands, feet or testicles, ‘although I’ve been on the point of trying them on various occasions’. He also told them that he rejected overweight men because they had too much cholesterol, and the elderly were spared because their flesh was contaminated and very tough.

  To add to his already bizarre account, he claimed that he did not kill anyone and that the bodies had been given to him by various different people, including members of the police. However, notwithstanding the large amount of bones that were found buried around his shack of a home, nobody believed his story.

  Local press gave a completely different report and claimed that he preyed on homeless men and labourers whom he clubbed to death with a metal tube to satisfy his voracious appetite. It was also speculated that Vargas may have been used as a scapegoat for a ring of human organ traffickers. What was even more disturbing was that Vargas was a former mental hospital patient who was arrested on similar charges several years previously, but was released shortly afterwards due to lack of evidence.

  The case of Dorangel Vargas is still undergoing investigation.

  The Tupinamba