Every era probably thinks of itself as being fairly enlightened. Today, we all seem pretty confident that we know how the world works, but we can still see examples of people believing some incredibly stupid things all the time. In the future, it’s quite likely that people will write articles about the world today and all the stupid things we believed, just as we can now look at some of the things people in the medieval world believed and wonder how we ever survived as a species.
10. Salamanders can live in fire
For about 1,500 years, people believed that the humble salamander was somehow immune to fire. This is all the more surprising because for those 1,500 years, we can safely assume that everyone understood what fire did to living things. However, this persistent belief actually gave birth to salamanders as mythical beasts.
Pliny the Elder insisted that the cool flesh of the salamander could put out the fire , who probably killed several salamanders who died trying to prove it against their will. Note that he was simply trying to prove what he had heard from Aristotle.
By the time of Saint Isidore, between 560 and 636, people still believed this fact about salamanders, and Isidore confirmed it and also suggested that they poisoned fruits . St. Augustine believed that they lived in fire. Leonardo da Vinci insisted that the little creatures ate fire instead of food. Paracelsus replaced fire with the four primary elements and put the salamander in its place.
So where does the belief come from? It is thought that it may have something to do with the salamander's habit of living in rotten logs. If you were to throw one into a fire, you would likely see live salamanders scurrying out, giving the impression that they were actually living in the fire.
9. Newlyweds had to kiss over a stack of cakes
Few events in a person's life are subject to more curious beliefs and rituals than a wedding. Even today, people still hold on to things like the desire to include something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. There's not much reason for this, it's either tradition or superstition, no matter how you look at it.
In the Middle Ages, one of the many wedding traditions was to create cake towers or buns with spices. Think of it as an old-fashioned version of today's tiered cakes. But instead of just looking big and in charge, the newlywed couple had to sit at the top of the tower and kiss each other If the kiss went off without a hitch, it was good luck for the couple. If the glass fell, well, better luck next time.
8. In medieval Italy, poverty was considered a virtue
There is much talk about rights in the modern world, but look to the customs of late medieval Italy to see next-level rights in action. At the time, the rich viewed the poor as a means to an end. In this case, the end was heaven. The means was to give them alms so that they could pray for the rich and eventually get to heaven.
At that time, the idea of being poor was considered virtuous. Being poor was a difficult experience and prepared your soul for good things to come. Along the way, they helped the rich get to heaven , giving them the opportunity to show their benevolence. So the rich saw no reason to do anything to help the poor in the long run. They didn't even want the poor to go away. They wanted the poor to be there so they could be kind to them, which would grant them eternal salvation.
Eat even a saying , that "the rich help the poor in this world, and the poor help the rich in the world to come," reflecting the belief that one need not necessarily shun one's wealth or uplift the poor in this world, because everything will be balanced in heaven.
7. Medieval Scots believed they were descended from an Egyptian princess
Every human being at one point or another begins to ask where they came from. This is where myths about origins and religion begin to form, and while most of them are well known today, they all had to start somewhere. The people of Scotland once believed that a woman named Scota helped form Scotland and Ireland around 1400 BC.
According to legend, Scota was the daughter Egyptian Pharaoh named Cingris. There are no records of this pharaoh in Egypt, and it seems to be exclusively Irish and Scottish tradition. Scota married a Babylonian named Niul, and together they had a son named Goidel Glas. It was he who created the Gaelic language and the people known as the Gaels.
In 1360, John of Fordun published history of Scotland , in which it is believed that he simply took the Irish tales of Scota and turned them into something he liked for Scottish history. In his version, Goidel Glas, now renamed Gaitelos, marries Scota. They are exiled to Spain from Egypt, have a son, and then he marries another woman named Scota, the daughter of yet another pharaoh. Two of their sons conquer Ireland, defeating the Tuatha De Danann, who you might recognize as fairies, and some of their descendants called themselves Scoti, after Scota, which evolved into Scots.
6. Fruits and vegetables need to be cooked for safety.
For better or worse, much of our modern knowledge of the Middle Ages comes from pop culture. To that end, most people imagine a medieval diet consisting of bread and honey, maybe some hard cheese, and boneless meat, perhaps in a stew.
Medieval people ate fruits and vegetables, but they had a different attitude towards them than we do today. In particular, fruits and vegetables were never eaten raw because it was generally believed that raw fruits and vegetables cause diseases .
The fruits that grew on trees were better than the fruits on the ground because the tree tops were close to the sky. Watermelon and strawberries were lowly fruits, more suitable for the poor. Doctors recommended eat some fruits at the beginning of a meal and others at the end for various pseudo-medical reasons, such as their ability to either stop you from vomiting or help you go to the toilet.
5. Crocodiles cry out of remorse when they eat, hence the crocodile tears.
When you say someone is shedding crocodile tears, you are roasting them for being insincere when they are pretending to be concerned but are not. This comes from the popular belief that snakes, and especially crocodiles, shed tears for their prey as they eat it. So while the image suggested that the beast was somewhat remorseful about the kill, it was still eating something, so the lack of sincerity was noticeable.
In The Voyages and Travels of Sir John Mandeville this statement was used in 1400 , and this statement can also be found in the letter from 1569 , but it is presented there in a context where it was common enough to need no explanation. The crocodiles cried in false sadness as they ate.
Ironically, crocodiles shed tears when they eat, but the reason may be due to air passing through their sinuses when they eat, rather than any remorse related to the meal.
4. A magnet can be demagnetized with goat blood
Magnets are pretty cool even today, so you can imagine what people thought about them hundreds of years ago. The ability to move metal with invisible forces must have been pretty close to magical.
If something is magical, it probably means there are magical ways to deal with it. In the case of magnets, it was thought that their power can be neutralized things like diamonds or goat's blood. Garlic was another product suggested by alchemists as a means of demagnetizing them, although a man named William Gilbert had to disprove all this in 1600, supposedly by demonstrating bloody but fully functional magnets.
3. People believed that witches stole men's penises
Any beliefs about witches should be taken with a grain of salt because we are assuming that witches were real. Also, when it came to the fear of witches, some writers went out of their way to come up with reasons to be afraid of them, and Heinrich Kramer may have won the cake.
In his 15th-century witch-hunting manual, Malleus Maleficarum, Kramer warned that witches could steal a man's penis. They could even keep it as a pet and feed them grain. He goes on to say that many have seen similar things. He also claims that one man, in an attempt to get his stolen penis back, was forced to climb a tree and raid a nest of many penises to choose the one he liked best.
The idea of penis trees permeated the mythology of witches, and in 2000 In Massa Marittima, Italy, a fresco was discovered depicting numerous witches under such a tree. Some people still claim that it is simply a fertility symbol and not related to witches, but given the history, there is definitely room for debate.
2. For a long time it was believed that lynx urine turned into precious stones.
When we think of big cats, we usually think of lions, tigers, panthers, and maybe a cheetah. Less remembered is their slightly smaller but still fearsome cousin, the lynx. One of the lynx’s lesser-known claims to fame is that its urine crystallizes into a gemstone called lingurium . This came from the philosopher Theophrastus around 200 BC or so.
By the medieval period, lingurium had a full life in the hands of expert gem cutters who dealt with gemstones and their nature. Books were written detailing the physical nature of the stone and even its healing properties. Keep in mind that this stone never existed and none of these people had seen it or known anything about it for that reason.
Only in the 17th century new authors finally stopped writing about the fictional stone.
1. John Mandeville perpetuated the belief that cotton came from lambs raised on plants.
Medieval art often leaves one perplexed when you see how animals and other natural objects are represented, especially when they are tragically at odds with reality. It makes you wonder how someone could get the real thing so wrong. Unfortunately, a lot of art at the time was created by people who had never seen what they were painting and was based on second- or third-hand evidence. And then some of it was just random, made-up stuff. That's where appears Vegetable lamb from Tatarstan .
Cotton was something new to the Western world in John Mandeville's time. For some reason, when he was exploring (or pretending to explore) a world that few people in England had even heard of, the man insisted on making everything up. So when news came of cotton that looked like wool but came from a plant, Mandeville told the story that it was really a small plant with a long stem, at the top of which a tiny flower blossomed. lamb . This understanding of cotton lasted from the 13th to the 17th centuries. Try to imagine generations of people who believed in tiny sheep growing like flowers, and who made fabrics for them.
The little plant lamb didn't just look like a lamb, it was one. It hung from its stalk and ate everything it could reach around the plant, then died when there was no food left. You could catch one and eat it, and the meat was said to taste like fish and the blood like honey. So it wasn't a quick misunderstanding. Mandeville and whoever picked up his bizarre story were sincere in their attempts to just make up nonsense and make people believe something.
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