Historical Mythbusting Spectacular!

write anyway. It's available for preorder now, and preorder is extremely weird, you know, to buy a book that's not going to come out until February, but it's actually really important for authors. My publisher is going to look at those preorder numbers and make their decision based on them about where to put the book and how many eyeballs to put in front of. So if you're at all interested in the book, it would mean the world to me if you checked it out and maybe gave future

you a surprise gift. If we are ever in the same city, I promise I will track you down and sign it for you. The link to the preorders is in the bio, and so now into the episode. This episode is a little bit different. It's our fifty episode of Noble Blood, and so rather than focus on just one story, I'm going to focus on five, five historical myths that, for whatever reason, have persisted to this day. Sometimes I think understanding which lies spread and why can

be just as important as understanding the actual truth. So let's dive in. First up, it has to be. First up, it's most important. Let the meat cake. Everyone has heard this story. In fact, when you think about Marie Antoinette, it's probably the first thing that you think of. The story goes that starving peasants wearing their dustiest rags, gaunt with hunger and poverty, come to Versailles, the gilded palace, in which Marie Antoinette and her husband feasted on bond

bonds under painted ceilings. Please, one of the peasants say, his giant eyes turned up hopefully towards the queen. The people of France don't have any bread to eat. Marie Antoinette rolls her eyes and sighs, annoyed that she has to look at a poor person. Her painted lips curled devilishly, and she replies, let them eat cake. As far as setups and punchlines go, there's practically nothing better. It's the catty bon moo equivalent of Lucille Bluth from Arrested Development

thinking that a banana costs ten dollars. It's little wonder that the story caught on and on and on. This smith Bus thing is a double act. The first myth to bust is that, as pedants left to point out, Marie Antoinette would have actually said la brioche, which pardoning my awful French pronunciation, means let them eat brioche. Brioche refers to an incredibly rich bread made with butter and

with eggs. It's as good as cake to an eighteenth century French peasant, and so Marie Antoinette saying let them eat brioche is basically just a more specific variation on the same punchline. But the more important correction is that Marie Antoinette never told peasants to eat cake or brioche,

or croissant or any pastry. Before and during the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette became a scapegoat to represent all of the ills of the second estate, the ruling nobility of France, the elite upper class, not only would she the most visible consumer of the French royal family with her expensive clothes and elaborate hairstyles, but also she was foreign in Austrian, which meant that people were primed from the beginning to

hate her. The first recorded variation on the quote let them eat cake story actually comes from a sixteenth century German story about a noblewoman who wonders aloud why poor people who can't afford bread just don't eat the pastry cross um. The story came to France two hundred years later, or at least it was popularized in Rousseau's Confessions, in which he attributes the quote to an anonymous princess, most likely just meaning it apocryphal lee. At the time that

Rousseau was writing, Marie Antoinette was nine years old. She was the younger sister of princesses in Austria, not at all in line to be married to the Prince of France. Yet and Rousseau would not have cared at all what she was up to. The little preteen princess known as Maria Antonio was not spouting poetic about the French population

and their lack of brioche consumption. I'm a known defender of Marie Antoinette, which seems like a strange thing to say, but I do think it's interesting and important to look at Marie Antoinette's life and role as it would have been established in the framework of eighteenth century French politics. She was told and raised to be the queen of a country from the age of fourteen. She was married to the Dafais France, and her role was not political.

It wasn't her decision to make what the French people were taxed or what the government was spending its money on. Her role really was to wear clothes by French designers and spawn sir French hairstylists and throw parties and entertained diplomats. She was raised for a very specific role and purpose that, unfortunately, by the end of the eighteenth century became obsolete, and I would argue for good reason, but in her own tiny bubble raised her entire life in a elaborate court ritual,

a tradition. Marie Antoinette, by all accounts, was a kind and generous person. There are stories of Marie Antoinette stopping her carriage because she saw a child on the side of the road, and then in effect adopting that child to pay for their education and comfortable lifestyle. As an individual, she was kind and tried to help poor people, but Marie Antoinette had no education, interest, or really even role when it came to helping the poor people of France

as a whole. It's interesting also that she's painted as so out of touch and eliteau, which again she was. But Marie Antoinette, as an individual, loved this idea of painting herself as a farm girl or woman of the people. At Versailles, she built a tiny village that was meant to represent a French farm village, where she would shed all of the layers of her court finery, put on simple linen peasant wear, and in effect play poor person

for an afternoon. She would milk goats and cows and take fresh eggs from chickens, although of course all of the fresh eggs that she was taking from chickens would have been removed prior to Marie Antoine, it coming wiped down of all the chicken viscera and then replaced underneath the chicken. It was basically a disnified version of what being a peasant was like. Now that I say it, I recognize how wildly out of touch that seems, but

there's something almost quaint about it, I find. But of course, when the French Revolution came, she was the Queen of France, the female head of this incredibly destructive and archaic institution, and so that had had to quite literally roll. Rousseau's writing was incredibly influential to the revolutionaries who would overthrow Marie Antoinette and the entire French monarchy. So it's more than likely that they conflated his anecdotal story with their

queen because it's so thematically perfect. But the debunking has been going on almost ever since. Fifty years after the French Revolution, a writer in the French journal leg Whip said that he could prove that the let Them Eat Cake rumor about Marie Antoinette was false because he had found the quote in a book dated seventeen sixty. But that debunking didn't really take nor did the next, nor did the next. A good story spreads faster than a boring truth, especially when it's a story that fits our

preconceived notions about who a person is. Let Them Eat Cake is perhaps one of the most effective propaganda campaigns in history, because even more than two hundred years later, it's still the most famous thing about a woman who never said it. Next up the classic rumor that Napoleon and Parra of France was short. It's a rumor so pervasive that there's even a complex named after it in which someone adopts a personality of overaggression or domineering behavior

in order to compensate for being short. The rumor about Napoleon being unnaturally short is a rumor with a seemingly

simple explanation. A according to the French measurement system at the time, Napoleon was five to objectively on the shorter side for a man, but the metric system hadn't yet normalized measurements across Europe, and the French inch at the time was two point seven centimeters while the Imperial inch is two point five four centimeters, which means that by modern metrics, Napoleon would have stood a little bit above five five, or just about average height for a man

at the time. Another factor that contributed to the idea that Napoleon was short was that he would have surrounded himself with his most elite soldiers, who were incredibly tall, genetically blessed Frenchman. Anyone flanked by two eighteenth century Parisian shacks would look short by comparison, and the idea of

Napoleon being short took root in British propaganda. The cartoonist James Gilray was incredibly influential, especially with his drawings of the quote maniac Ravings of Little Bony, in which Napoleon is depicted as a tantramming toddler in boots half the size of his body. Another famous Gilray drawing, titled The plum Putting of Danger, features Napoleon across a dinner table from the British Prime Minister William Pitt. While the pair of men divide up a dessert meant to depict the globe.

Pitt is depicted as tall and lanky, with legs that are practically skeletal. Cartoons are all about contrast, and so Napoleon, practically hidden beneath the large hat, is tiny. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the cartoons infuriated Napoleon. He sent a barrage of letters across the Channel demanding that the British government censored depictions of him in their press. Surprise, surprise, the British government did not heed his request, and that left Napoleon between

a rock and a hard place. Getting angrier about it would only make him look like the short, ill tempered toddler with something to compensate for. The next rumor is one that verges a little bit on the pornographic, so if you're listening with a younger listener, you might want to fast forward a little bit. This is the rumor about Catherine the Great. Maybe you've heard of it, that the female Empress of Russia died while having sex with a horse. Enemies of Catherine the Great long painted her

as a sexual deviant. She did have a number of sexual relationships after her one ill fated marriage too, Zar Peter the Third, although not a number of relationships that would have raised eyebrows if she had been a male ruler. When Catherine was a teen major, a minor German princess who was still named Sophie at the time, she was married off to Peter the Third, who was to be brief terrible at being a czar. To make a long story extremely short, Catherine overthrew her husband with the help

of her lover, Gregory or Love. From there. Catholick's romantic partners were usually also her political partners. She tended to be attracted to men like Gregory Patempkin with a military and political mind who could help her rule the incredibly vast Empire of Russia. It's a side effect of being a woman with power that terrible rumors start to spread eventually, and Catherine's personality encouraged certain rumors to some degree. There

were the aforementioned partners. Even into her middle and older age, Catherine continued to take lovers, many of whom were men much younger than she was. And it's also believed that Catherine kept a small room adjacent to her suite where she kept pornographic materials and erotica, including furniture carved with

explicit and X rated naked figures. During World War Two, German soldiers raiding the palace in supposedly found the secret rooms and took photos of the furniture, but since then the furniture was either lost in the chaos of war or purposefully removed by the Russian government to protect the

royal family's virtue. But none of that quite explains the extremeness and specificity of the story that so many of us have heard about Catherine the Great, That she was engaging in beastiality with a horse suspended above her when the horses harness broke and crushed her to death. I hate killing a fun rumor as much as the next person, but it's not true. Catherine died of a stroke at age sixty seven in her bed not having sex with a horse. Insane as it sounds, though that horse rumor

didn't quite come out of nowhere. At the time, the notion of quote riding a horse was a common euphemism for female sexuality, and Catherine, who frequently wore male bridges and military dress, was also a famed equestrian. An actual equestrian, she was incredibly adept at riding a horse, so that's basically the origin of the rumor that she was more sexually promiscuous than might have been expected of a woman in the eighteenth century, and that she was really good

and really interested in riding horses. And rumors, especially colorful rumors, are hard to kill. Propaganda against the Empress was extremely common in her lifetime, both in Russia and abroad. When Catherine the Great, who was a frequent pen pal of Voltaire, didn't throw her support behind the French revolutionaries during their revolt, they showed their lack of appreciation with a series of particularly harsh caricatures, although you can't really blame any monarch

for not supporting the group overthrowing and beheading monarchs. And then when it comes to legacy, it also didn't help Catherine the Great that the next to inherit the Russian throne, her son Paul the First, hated and resented her. But I suppose when it comes to legacy for Catherine the Great it's a mixed bag. We may half believe that she died in a outrageous act of sexual grotesquery, but then again we do still refer to her as the Great.

There are some rumors that aren't really commonly discussed anymore, but which were at one time wildly popular conspiracy theories, namely that Elizabeth the First, England's long reigning female monarch, the Virgin Queen who ushered in an era of artistic and domestic prosperity, was actually a man. The popularizer of this myth was actually the author from Stoker, who you

probably know for his book Dracula. Soaker also wrote a book published in nine called Famous Impostors, in which he claimed that Queen Elizabeth was actually replaced by a male doppelganger when she was a child, and that it was he the doppelganger who was actually ruling during the Great Elizabethan Age. Stoker had been traveling through the Cotswalds of England when he found himself in a small village where for their May Day celebration they had a small boy

dress up as Elizabeth. When Stoker inquired as to the origins of the tradition, they told him this story that when Princess Elizabeth was young, sometime around fifteen forty three or forty four, she had been sent to that village of Bristly in the Cotswalts to avoid the threat of plague that was so deadly in the more densely populated city. But while Elizabeth was there on her countryside retreat, she died,

whether of the plague or another unspecified illness. Princess Elizabeth's governess, knowing that Elizabeth's father, King Henry, was famous for his temper, decided that she would hide the Princess's death before King Henry came out to the countryside to visit his daughter. The governess had a small problem. There were no young girls in the village who at all resembled the pale

red haired Elizabeth. But there was a young boy, a little playmate of the deceased Elizabeth, who had surprisingly delicate features, who was fair with light eyes and light hair. With time until the king's visit running short, the governess decided to dress the little boy up in Elizabeth's clothing and hoped for the best. King Henry, who was either in a hurry or not quite sure what his daughter looked like.

After a few months, apart fully believed the Khan, and so from that time on, the young country boy became the Princess Elizabeth, and the real princess, who had died, was buried anonymously somewhere in a quiet Cotswald's grave. Supposedly three hundred years later, the Reallizabeth's body was dug up accidentally during some building work. The body was conveniently reburied without anyone doing an actual examination or knowing where it was buried, but the Cotswald's May Day tradition was born.

There are a couple of factors that might tempt someone to suspect that maybe Elizabeth was a man, outside of just the basic sexism of not wanting to believe a woman could effectively rule a country. She famously wore thick powder makeup, although the real reason was that she wore it to cover up smallpox scars and not stubble, and Elizabeth famously never married or had children. Being a virgin queen married to England would be a convenient cover if she were actually a man who couldn't go to bed

with some random foreign prints. But the most compelling evidence for some less than enlightened spirits was the power of her leadership. Her speeches were rousing, she had a temper, she was controlling, She was an incredible leader. In short, she was all of the traits stereotypically assigned to male monarchs. As I'm sure you can catch on, there is no truth to the rumors. Elizabeth was examined by a number of doctors throughout her life, and none of them mentioned

that she had male anatomy at all. And also, at various points in her life there were nurses and ladies who were bribed by suitors or politicians to inform them as to whether Elizabeth was still having her monthly bleeding.

I eat to let them know if she was still of child bearing years all of that is to say Elizabeth was absolutely a woman, and the idea of her secretly being replaced by a male doppelganger by a governess in a moment of panic is a fun story and a fun origin to a tradition of a village where they dress a young boy up in costume, but not

much else. In the vein of impostors and conspiracy theories, here's a conspiracy theory that some people actually believe to this day that the son of Marie Antoinette and King Louis the sixteenth of France, Louis Charles, the Lost Aufhen, actually survived the French Revolution. The story of Louis Charles of France is tragic. He was a Prince of Versailles four years old when his older brother died, which made him the future Louis the seventeenth of France and heir

to the French throne. But then when he was still a young boy, the French Revolution imprisoned his family. His father was beheaded and his mother was imprisoned, and the young Louis Charles was brutally tortured with an earshot of his mother. He was beaten and also made to drink wine until he stumbled to make the guards laugh. He was told that his parents were traitors and that his

mom had sexually abused him. And then, of course, his mother, Marie Antoinette, who spent her days pressed against the wall of her jail cell hoping to catch a glimpse of her son as he was brought back and forth from his abusive lessons, was also beheaded. When Louis Charles was ten years old, he too died of tuberculosis or jail

fever in jail in the Temple Prison. Obviously, his death, the death of the boy that royalists would have at the time believed was the then King of France, was of massive importance to the revolutionary government, and so a doctor, Doctor Pelletan, was brought in to do a full autopsy.

The body of Louis Charles was thrown into a mass grave in the Saint Marguerite Cemetery, but Dr Pelletan was still secretly sympathetic to the royal family, especially after seeing all of the physical abuse that young Louis Charles had suffered, and so the doctor kept a small souvenir he kept the young Prince's heart snuck into his pocket in a handkerchief and then safe in a jar tucked into his

desk drawer. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, more than a hundred people would come forward claiming to be the lost Prince who had disappeared in jail. After all, how did anybody know for sure that he was dead? And being the lost of fault was a valuable claim to make, Especially after the French Revolution settled and the possibility of a Bourbon restoration went from possible to then after Napoleon imminent, the idea of a Bourbon prince impostor

became so ubiquitous that it was a cultural punchline. A hobo pretending to be the little boy Dolphin appears in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. The real boom in False Dafense came when the child's uncle, the man who became known as Louis SEV, became king. After Napoleon's fall. There were so many impostors that fraudulently claiming to be the King

of France was illegal. French authorities didn't really pay that much attention to enforcing that law, but there were a few really prominent cases with so much support behind them that the French authorities did ultimately take them to trial. One such man was known as Charles de Navar, a traveler from New Orleans with facial scars and missing teeth, who wrote letters to the king and the Dauphin's lone

surviving sister. He signed those letters d'aufin with an F. The most famous impostor by far was a man who went by Carl Wilhelm Nundorff. Nandorff was from Prussia and he claimed to be a clockmaker, but he had been

locked up in Germany for counterfeiting and he couldn't speak French. Nonetheless, he persuaded a former Versailles lady maid and private secretary that he actually was the lost Little Prince, although it's also possible, I think that they were in on the scheme and that he was angling for a payout, and the Versailles ladies and maids may have thought that they

would be rewarded for their loyalty. Nandorff's case went to trial, he was guilty, and he was banished to England, where he was eventually arrested for trying to build an elaborate explosive. When he did eventually die in Holland in eighteen forty five.

His gravestone identified him as Louis Charles. His descendants remained committed to the Khan the belief that he really was the last remaining descendant of the Bourbon monarchy, although in scientists ran a DNA test on the lock of Nandorff's hair to prove once and for all that he was an impostor DNA once again swooping in to ruin the fund. DNA would also give us the real answer of what

happened to the show called Last Defense. That calcified heart that the doctor had taken from the autopsy as a souvenir would eventually end up in the royal crypt of Sindony alongside the mother and father. In two thousand, geneticists proved that the heart did in fact belong to the dead Louis Charles, the ten year old Prince of France

who died in prison. To me, stories of the Last of Fen escaping are similar to rumors that the young Anastasia actually survived the murder of the Romanovs in Katerinburg. It's a fairy tale, a romantic, hopeful story, and so much easier to swallow than the tragedy of young, pointless political death. There's one more historical myth that I have that isn't quite related to nobility, but one that I can't help debunking, and so if you'll bear with me,

I'm going to debunk it anyway. Do you know those medieval torture devices that you can imagine from cartoons, The iron maiden with spikes that would close and go through a person's whole body, the rack, the pair of anguish stretcher that was supposedly inserted and expanded into someone's bodily orifice, either a mouth or rear end as punishment for sexual deviancy. Well,

all of them are basically made up. They were all basically invented in the eighteenth century to scandalize and entertain people in medieval torture museums, and they've more or less served the same purpose ever since. The idea of medieval torture devices just don't hold up to any real academic scrutiny.

There was an examination of that so called pair of anguish that was on display in a torture museum, and the examination showed that it would have been far too weak to have opened in any bodily orifice, and that it also had a latch that would have prevented that expansion. The first actual mention of a pair of anguish comes not from the Middle Ages, but from the eighteen hundreds.

One historian suggested that it might have been a device to stretch gloves or sucks, and the iron maiden that upright coffin with spikes that someone's made to get into and then you know, the door closes and they're impaled. Well, that was a flat out phony invention. The first mention of it as a torture device in the Middle Ages came from a writer named Johann Philip sieben Keys. While he was writing a guide book to the city of Nuremberg.

He described a criminal dying in an Egyptian mummy case lined with spikes in the year fifteen fifty, but he had no actual evidence of that ever happening. It was mostly just a creepy, gross story that he wrote as he wanted to drum up attention. There's no actual evidence that the so called iron maiden was ever used for torture in the Middle Ages, or that it ever existed before the eighteenth century, but iron maidens began to pop

up at torture museums across Europe. Not actual historical relics, mind you, just things fabricated to demonstrate what they say medieval people did. There was even one on display at the World's Fair in Chicago, and you can imagine why people were so enthralled by it. We're enthralled by it still.

It's incredibly grizzly. And then there's something like the rack, which would stretch people out to torture them into confession, which actually was a documented torture device, but far back in ancient times, centuries before the birth of Christ, nowhere near the Middle Ages. And yet the morbid popularity of medieval torture museums, particularly among Victorian audiences, lead to racks

being displayed as devices from the Middle Ages. Again, none of those devices on display and museums were authentic or ever used to torture anyone. Any devices that appeared in so called torture museums were entirely fabricated for museum purposes. Torture did exist in the Middle Ages, but it was a little less cinematic and a lot less grotesque than

people might want to believe. The most common form of medieval torture was being tied with ropes or restrained in a pillory, which is the device that you can imagine where someone's head and arms are held through a wooden board. The point of a pillory was to humiliate, not to name. If a woman was sent to the pillory, she traditionally would have been allowed to sit on the stool. But people in the Torrian ages like now love the drama

of the morbid, of the shocking, of the macabre. I mean, I have a podcast called Noble Blood and it's run for fifty episodes, and it's not purely Happenstand that I tend to gravitate towards stories of death and mystery. On some level, maybe it's satisfying to believe that we're morally or ethically superior to our ancestors, That they were neanderthal like brutes, racist, sexist, bloodthirsty, and that we because we're

able to gasp, but their stories aren't. I can tell you that, in my nearly two years of writing and researching this podcast, the thing that I've come to realize above all else, it's just how similar we are to people in the past, how normal they were, how funny they were, they made jokes, they fell in love, they got bored, they made mistakes. Rumors are fun and they spread for a reason. But there's nothing more compelling to me than digging down to find the truth in the

real story. Here's to fifty episodes of Noble Blood and hopefully the next fifty to come. Thank you so so much for your support. I really wouldn't be able to do any of this without you. Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minky. The show was written and hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Manky, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the

show over at Noble blood tails dot com. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio is at the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M M