How to Slay a Dragon

by Cait Stevenson

  Toilet paper. Abu Zayd is talking about toilet paper.

  So there you have it. You need to wash your clothing, you should probably give up on trying to have good breath most of the time, and it would be a good idea to visit a bathhouse every chance you get. But the most important decision of all comes down to water versus paper.

  Because in the end, how to keep the rest of you clean doesn’t matter if you don’t also clean your end.

  WHEN (NOT IF) BANDITS ATTACK YOUR PARTY

  It was the heat of summer 1493, and the Glowaty brothers had a grudge. To prove it, they took an entire town hostage. Bandits in the Middle Ages did not mess around.

  But they’re pretty eager to mess around with you.

  The wealthy Slovak town of Bardejov was pretty good at what it did, too. New bandits were always prowling around—towns, villages, roads, castles. In the anarchy of the Polish-Hungarian border, towns were often left to defend themselves. And in this case, practice does make perfect, because by summer 1493, Bardejov had captured and promptly tortured four members of the Glowaty gang. One received the swift death of beheading, while three more hung from the gallows.

  Fedor Glowaty was not amused, especially since one of the men executed was his brother. So the bandits took Bardejov hostage. Deliver 400 gold pieces, they threatened, or we will burn your town and put your people to the sword. You and six other towns. Leave the money at one of these two monasteries and walk away.

  Bardejov did not leave 400 florins at Mogila or Leichna or any other monastery for that matter. In fact, its leaders let others do all the paying. Annoyed local nobles hired posses who drove the Glowaty gang to Poland. There, the even more annoyed nobles of Kosice had to hire an entire company of mercenaries to eliminate the legendary bandits.

  Banditry in the Middle Ages was not always so dramatic, and it was never romantic. Not for you as the victim, and not for the “noble” thieves of the forest, either. People were arrested for stealing yarn, clothing, even salted fish (the protein bars of medieval Europe). Items like these weren’t trivial to the people who would risk death by hanging for even the negligible sale price of yarn, or for something to eat during a long winter. The goods sure weren’t trivial to their victims, either. Nor were the robberies that easily turned into murders—always a risk with people who had, metaphorically and literally, nothing to lose.

  You’ll probably have to cross large swathes of territory where attacks by roving robbers aren’t exactly mundane, but also should not surprise you when they happen. (You’re a hero. They will happen.) In the Near East, the passage across the Sinai Desert was essentially open season on rich pilgrims heading for Jerusalem. Across Europe, soldiers suddenly dismissed from an army after a truce were more or less assumed to be bandits in the making. In 1434, a group of six peasants in Burgundy even used “But they could have been bandits” as an excuse to murder and rob two ex-soldiers—a motive judged fully legitimate by all. Jewish rabbis debated the ethics of purchasing back your own stolen goods. And in 1474 Poland, one priest was shocked—shocked—to discover that his newly purchased hymnals and Eucharist chalice had been stolen from another church.

  But sometimes banditry was that dramatic, even when Glowatys weren’t involved. For example, those hundreds of mercenaries supposedly required to capture the gang needed some way to get more money after they spent that particular payout. Or just “England in the early fourteenth century,” really. Forget those two monasteries that may or may not have been cooperating in the blackmail of Bardejov. In early fourteenth-century England, Robert Bernard, priest and occasional professor at the University of Oxford (really), embezzled money from his parish and got kicked out… and to get revenge, hooked up with a well-known outlaw gang. In 1328, a handful of its bandits invaded Bernard’s former church, beat up its remaining vicar, and stole the most recent donations. Meanwhile, Bernard himself was already hard at work in a second parish, both in terms of being its priest and in terms of stealing from its own donations.

  Early fourteenth-century England also contained Sir (yes, Sir) William Chetulton, of Baddington and Broomhall in Cheshire, who was accused in 1320 of robberies and assaults around Acton. He made up for it by serving King Edward II in his war on rebels from 1321 to 1325, during which Chetulton turned himself and the king a handsome profit by looting their lands. In spring 1327, he received a royal pardon for whatever he had done prior to leaving the king’s service and was promptly accused of six murders. At some point after that, he… the records aren’t clear exactly what he did, but he wasn’t caught, and so was declared an outlaw. In the spring of 1332, he turned himself in anyway, probably to have his outlaw status revoked so he could then be pardoned for those crimes by the summer. At which point he was assigned to pursue and arrest other robbers, a task at which he lasted all of two months before being accused of robbery and rape. Remember, this was Sir William Chetulton.

  Or maybe you’d prefer the story of Sir Robert Ingram, who joined a bandit gang that included robbers, counterfeiters, and straight-up murderers—but still represented his city and region in Parliament. Because he was the mayor of Nottingham and the sheriff of Nottinghamshire.

  Fortunately, you won’t have to be on constant watch for nobles robbing for the fun of it or for the desperate bandits of the highways. Unfortunately, you’ll need to be aware that with every new step, you might be walking into a war zone.

  “Robbery and devastation of land” was a universal war tactic in the Middle Ages. It was cunningly cruel: ruin the enemy’s territory and thus starve the soldiers otherwise. The soldiers would all be forced to participate in stealing food from the enemy’s peasants (and their own monarch wouldn’t have to spend money). It was also the standard means by which the larger kingdoms of medieval Europe—you might know them as France, England, and Germany—conquered land and consolidated power. Without customs and border guards, lords built networks of small castles and sent out regular raiding parties not just to keep their victims in line, but also to keep other lords away.

  And don’t go thinking towns kept their hands clean. Bardejov’s town council received any number of requests from neighboring towns for the return of stolen horses. In 1456, Bardejov “arrested” two nobles and two burghers to extort a solid ransom for themselves. In 1479, the Hungarian king himself demanded that Bardejov pay up for its militia’s crimes.

  Bardejov, it turns out, was a little too good at what it did.

  To summarize: in order to avoid bandits, you need to avoid roads, forests, deserts, shires, cities, and kingdoms. Good thing you have that armor.

  HOW to CROSS a CURSED SWAMP

  The upside here is clear. You don’t really need any special lessons to learn how to cross a cursed swamp. You’ve got the basic supplies already: knee-high boots with no holes in them, that wide-brimmed pilgrim hat, an exorcist. You just need to know what you’re up against.

  The downside is you also don’t need to study cursed swamps to learn how to cross a cursed swamp. Yes, that is a downside. Welcome, my friend, to the world of late medieval toilets.

  PUBLIC TOILETS

  Yes, really, they existed. Some of them even had names!

  If you’re in Exeter, England, in 1470 or so, you can pay a visit to the “Pixie House.” Its users had a better sense of sarcasm than the Londoners who dubbed their version the “Longhouse.” On the other hand, the Londoners whose Longhouse had 128 stalls (yes, actual stalls) possessed a far better toilet building. Those Londoners could also pick and choose their favorite public latrines, which were scattered throughout the city. London was committed to its toilets.

  It’s probably a shock to learn that the experience of using an urban public toilet will be more or less the same as the latrine in your yard back home: over a hole while sitting on a wooden or stone bench. Cleaning off afterwards is a bring-your-own-rag affair. And the equivalent of modern flushing is the distance between the seat and the gutter or cesspit beneath. On the plus side, women can flush any feminine pr
oduct they want to!

  People had every reason to use the public toilets—even peer pressure. “Pees in the street” became a personal insult, or something only a poor person would do (… according to rich people). Incentive to maintain the latrines took a little more collective effort. The best strategy, in the end, was to convince rich people that donating money to maintain them was a great thing to put in their will.

  PRIVATE TOILETS

  The advantages of private toilets stretched high as a latrine tower and deep as a cesspit. There was no putting up with other patrons. No dealing with winter, no dealing with Scottish weather ever, no getting robbed on the way to or from a public privy at night. Private toilets were more or less limited to people who could afford a yard for building an outhouse. But for their owners (and people walking by in the street, who were not getting buckets of urine dumped on them), domestic latrines were a great thing. Most of the time.

  The inescapable consequence of owning or renting a toilet was the cesspit underneath. The inescapable result was the smell. The inescapable truth was that cesspits don’t eliminate the problem of waste removal; they just delay it.

  The typical solution was to follow the lead of public toilets and hire—or in fifteenth-century Nuremberg, your taxes would allow the city to hire—professional latrine cleaners. They were paid well enough to compensate for the danger and the social stigma of the job, too, and more importantly, to ensure they were good at their job.

  The lesson here? Paying taxes is pretty much the easiest way to reverse the curse of waste disposal.

  If you were lucky enough to situate your privy over a small stream or even a sewer, the easier waste disposal might help with the smell. But even then, you’ve still got neighbors. There was a good chance someone downstream was dumping enough to block up the whole thing and turn your latrine into a surprise fountain.

  Remember, though, bad neighbors are bad neighbors, not a curse.

  One final note: Like cities and individual donors, you’ll want to spend money on keeping your latrine in good shape. Richard le Rakiere could tell you why. On August 10, 1326, he was sitting innocently upon his toilet when the rotted boards finally broke under his weight. He splashed down into the sewage.

  Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. About that curse…

  CHAMBER POTS

  Well, Richard might disagree, but technically, in his example, we’re dealing with his laziness rather than an actual curse. Which brings us to the “swamp.”

  Public toilets meant dealing with weather, inconvenience, and the public. Ergo, private toilets. Private toilets were expensive; ergo, chamber pots. Chamber pots; ergo, emptying chamber pots. Emptying chamber pots; ergo, windows.

  If you decide to travel as a pilgrim, be absolutely sure to grab your wide-brimmed hat.

  SEWERS

  So, medieval engineers were great at designing hydraulics. Custom irrigation systems to suit the climates of Yemen, Egypt, Germany, Spain? Done. A Southampton, England, pipeworks system from 1420 that was still supplying water to the city in 1800? Coming right up. It seems reasonable that the people so good at water supply would put their efforts to work with waste removal. And in fact, they did! But here, well… gold star, Middle Ages, you tried.

  The technology for legitimate sewers absolutely existed and was put to good use. In England alone, one York monastery built an underground, stone-lined sewer that flowed into the nearby river. By 1300, Westminster Palace had managed multiple underground sewers. But London itself, so proud of its public toilet network? Not so much.

  On the other hand, London had its reasons to reject sewers. Municipal sewers couldn’t serve as public sewers—there was no way they could ever be big enough or flow fast enough to deal with a large population. People turned municipal sewers into public ones anyway, with results as—finally—swampy as you might expect.

  But there are more tactics to try! Don’t let that “swamp” become literal!

  By the late Middle Ages, cities were digging gutters alongside their roads. They also redirected the “natural” “streams” underneath the luckiest latrines to weave among buildings and empty into a nearby river or lake. But here, too, cities faced a no-win situation. Build stone vaults above the channels, so as not to have open sewage flowing through yards and beneath buildings? Or leave them open, and also be able to safely channel rain, melting snow, river floods, and at least some of the chamber pot problem?

  “A” for effort, Middle Ages, you really did try. You managed to keep the term “swamp” strictly in the realm of the metaphorical. Barely, but you did it. And “curse” has been well established as a metaphor. So much for learning the ins and outs of a cursed sw—

  GHOSTS

  Paschasius was a fifth-century deacon in Rome, well known to be a good man. Unfortunately, he supported the wrong papal candidate in 498, and never asked God’s forgiveness for his position. So, if you go to the bathhouse in Capua, you might see him there even today, his spectral form holding out a towel to serve you, trapped in his personalized purgatory.

  If you’d rather avoid Capua altogether and go farther south to Tauriana, you don’t have to worry about a deacon ghost popping up in the bath or toilet house. There are multiple attendants here, and they just act like they’ve worked here forever. Then again, there was that one time you brought along some precious religious relics as extra reward for the attendants’ services, and one of them refused. Only a man living in the grace of God could even touch them, he explained, and he was neither in the grace of God nor living.

  Sometimes, not even prayer can protect you. A young Franciscan friar was so overwhelmed by the power of God one day that he continued to pray and praise as he went to the privy. But when he was sitting down, cornered against the wall, a demon appeared out of nowhere. “You can’t pray here,” said the demon. “Filth is my domain.”

  So to summarize: Swamp, metaphorical. Curse, literal.

  HOW to BEFRIEND the ENCHANTED FOREST

  Maybe the Lady of the Lake is sitting under a tree when her magic spell entraps Merlin forever. Or maybe she uses the tree in her magic spell that entraps Merlin forever. Or maybe she outright entraps Merlin in a tree. Forever. Version after version of the Arthurian saga agrees—even the world’s most famous sorcerer should never have set foot in an enchanted forest.

  This legend is a big problem for you. Right now, you’re taking a sunny stroll with a sultan through the gardens of his beloved vacation home, and you’ve wandered into a lovely grove of date trees and palm trees.

  Except these trees are gold, or silver, or copper, and the figs are jewels. The palm fronds themselves are real, but sprays of water sprout from the branches along with the leaves. And the birds perched in the trees are silver and gold, glinting in the sun. The artificial birds open their artificial beaks to chirp a song that sounds anything but artificial, and then close their beaks. Other shining metal birds peck at the same piece of sparkling gemstone fruit—over and over and over.

  Robots. You’re pretty much standing in a forest of robots.

  The Middle Ages have just levelled up, and you’re going to need a new skill set to befriend this particular enchanted forest.

  STRATEGY #1: BE IMPRESSED BY IT

  The deeper in you go, the more the air sparkles with magic. On the outskirts, giraffes and elephants peek out at you from behind trees and inside clearings. Even the lions don’t venture farther toward you, where the sun now glints off the gold dangling from the leaves of hundreds of palm trees, which offer all the juicy dates or ripe oranges you could want. But go in deeper still, and the trees grow gold and silver branches whose leaves flutter in a breeze that doesn’t exist. The air is filled instead with the chirping of the silver and gold birds perched on its branches.

  Finally, you enter the heart of the forest, the grand finale: in front of your eyes, a tree emerges out of the ground, already fully grown, with glittering metallic birds hopping about its branches. Even the gentle pools here seem magi
cal, scented with roses and musk. So smile! You’re… standing in the throne room of Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir.

  The animals that you—and more to the point, every outside visitor to the palace—saw were real, and so was the fruit you enjoyed. The gold birds, the silver trees, the perfume fountains, and the fluttering leaves were robots.

  At no time should you forget the human craft that first gave them life. Every cranking of gears, every hiss of hydraulics or pneumatics reminded rivals of the caliph’s wealth, power, and mastery over the workings of the world.

  The strategy worked, too. Former Byzantine admiral Romanos Lekapenos led a diplomatic mission to al-Muqtadir’s court in 917 and 918, and he sure saw the palace pleasure gardens. More than saw—wanted others to see, too. During his visit, Romanos was already in the process of staging a silent coup back in Constantinople. (As one does when one is in Constantinople.) Upon his return home, he seized power for real. And somehow, he still found time to write about al-Muqtadir’s palace. Now that is an enchanted forest.

  STRATEGY #2: EXPAND IT

  The mighty Byzantine Empire was not to be outdone by anyone. Forget animating the throne room. They animated the throne.

  Romanos was eventually deposed and exiled by the same emperor he had once relegated to obscurity. (Constantinople at its finest.) But between his own coup in 919 and being subject to a coup in 944, he found engineers able to re-create and surpass what he had witnessed in the palace of al-Muqtadir. Shortly after Romanos’s, shall we say, departure, Constantinople received an ambassador from Italy. The tree that greeted him in the imperial throne room was bronze, complete with chirping bronze birds perched on its branches. It (obviously) did not grow out of the ground. But the throne itself was flanked by gold and bronze lions. They opened their mouths each time they roared and beat their tails against the ground. Singing birds adorned the top of the throne. And this throne moved.