Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (23 page)

In an atmosphere in which Christians felt acutely threatened both from abroad and within their communities, the call was made everywhere to punish homosexuality. God had destroyed the wicked people of Sodom and Gomorrah, according to one new law, because “they engaged in that sin which is against nature.” Now, “every man should be on guard against this failing” or risk “famine, plague, catastrophe, and countless other calamities.” To the late medieval mind, sickness and defeat were the natural result of heresy, and heresy was almost always accompanied by deviant sexual practices. In earlier years, sodomites could be forgiven; now people felt that they should be cast out or killed.
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During the late twelfth century, the church issued a canon requiring harsh sanctions against all heretics, Jews, moneylenders, Muslims, and homosexuals. Those who had sex with their own gender “on account of which the wrath of God came” were to be excommunicated and driven out of society. Many secular laws followed up by imposing laws requiring cruel executions. A Castilian law from the thirteenth century was typical:

Although we are reluctant to speak of something which is reckless to consider and reckless to perform, terrible sins are nevertheless sometimes committed, and it happens that one man desires to sin against nature with another. We therefore command that if any commit this sin, once it is proven, both be castrated before the whole populace and on the third day be hung up by the legs until dead, and that their bodies never be taken down.

Elsewhere, homosexual offenses brought burning at the stake and hanging by the “virile member.” By 1300, there were laws in place punishing homosexual behavior harshly in virtually every jurisdiction. One city required that homosexuals not only be burned, but that their families be forced to watch the execution and to remain until the fire was out.

Many of the same laws that punished homosexuals were also directed against Jews, who were particularly despised. Jews were suspected, among other things, of drinking the blood of Christians and sometimes feasting on semen as they collaborated with the devil. Mob violence against Jews exploded with the First Crusade in the 1090s, and soon they were being massacred for allegedly working with Muslims to poison well water. When the Black Death broke out in 1348 and killed over one-third of the European population, anti-Semitic passions reached a frenzy as Jews were widely blamed for causing the contagion with poisons and evil spells. Some thought the Jews had brought about the plague in anger over laws barring Jewish-Christian intermarriage; others were convinced that they were doing the bidding of Satan. Regardless, a broad swath of Christian society was convinced that Jews were the worst kind of heretics.

Sex with Jews was barred almost everywhere. It was commonly believed that they stank of the devil and gave birth to goats and pigs. Any contact with them was thought to transmit filth. In 1215, to prevent any accidental sexual assignations between Jews and Christians, the church ordered Jews to wear distinctive badges and clothing (the notorious yellow stars of Nazi Germany were a later revival of this tradition). Vienna required them to wear a hat shaped like devil or goat horns. When local bans on Jewish-Christian sex were ignored, the penalties were harsh. One Jew named Pandonus was publically castrated in front of the papal palace in Avignon for sleeping with a Christian woman. In 1222, an Oxford deacon was burned to death on a charge of bestiality for marrying a Jew. At about the same time, a Parisian man who had fathered children with a Jewish woman was also burned. The charge was sodomy, but the rationale was the same: “Coition with a Jewess is precisely the same as if a man should copulate with a dog.”
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MEDIEVAL LAW VIEWED bestiality and homosexuality as no less heretical than Judaism and Islam. The German word
Ketzer
, meaning heretic, was also used to mean sodomite; “to commit heresy with one another” was a euphemism for male-male intercourse. In this heated atmosphere, “sodomy” became a catch-all term for forbidden sex in its most extreme forms. By the close of the thirteenth century, a new legal text appeared in England prescribing live burial for anyone having sex with Jews, animals, persons of their own gender. The details of the sex were unimportant to the law. They were all insults to God, and deserving of the worst punishments.

Even in cosmopolitan Venice, which had a well-deserved reputation as a destination sex resort, sodomy was prosecuted as a “diabolical” crime against God. Death at the stake was the normal penalty, although there was some passing concern for the suffering such punishments caused. In 1445, authorities considered how to make sodomy executions less painful. It was suggested that the condemned be tied to wooden boards with their neck tightly chained, so that as the wood burned away they would be quickly strangled. The proposal was rejected.

With the Black Death and subsequent plagues, Venice’s ruling class feared that homosexuality on the city’s trading ships would provoke God to destroy the fleets. The city’s antisodomy rules had traditionally been ignored on the high seas, making thousands of merchant vessels informal safe zones for male-male sex. “It is surprising,” said a high criminal tribunal, “that divine justice has not sunk them.”
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The loophole was closed in 1420 with a new law barring “the vice of sodomy” on Venetian ships wherever they might be, and offering rewards to anyone reporting seaborne sodomites to the authorities. As with all sexual legislation, it is impossible to tell how effective this rule was in stopping sexual activity among merchant sailors. What it did do was make such sex much riskier.

Despite regular roundups and the torture of sodomy suspects, the Venetian authorities were convinced that the “abhorrent vice” was on the rise.
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Rumors swirled that men were meeting for sex in apothecaries and bakeries, as well as in churches and on street corners. To understand the scope of the problem, authorities commissioned what historian Guido Ruggiero has called a “sodomy census.” Two nobles from each of the city’s parishes spent a year scouring neighborhoods for signs that sodomy was taking place. The city also required doctors and barbers to report all cases in which their young or female patients’ hindquarters showed excessive wear and tear:

To eliminate the vice of sodomy from this city is worth every concern and as there are many women who consent to this vice and are broken in the rear parts and also many boys are so broken and all those treated, yet still none are accused and their deeds go unpunished; therefore, because it is wise to honor God . . . those who are broken in these parts be they boys or women are to be denounced.

Given the risks, few people must have sought treatment for “breaks” in their “rear parts,” although the law seemed to go a bit lighter on young passive homosexuals. In a 1474 prosecution against a homosexual “ring,” the men who did the penetrating were decapitated and then burned. A ten-year-old boy who had been the recipient of sex was only whipped. However, an eighteen-year-old passive boy in the same group was found to be old enough to know better: He received twenty-five lashes and had his nose cut off.

The Venetian authorities were also ready to show some lenience for bestial sodomy, but only when there was a solid excuse. An artisan named Simon, facing the death penalty for taking his pleasure with a goat, claimed that an accident had left him useless with women and unable to masturbate. Animals, he claimed, were his only sexual option. He was examined by surgeons, who found that while he had a “normal member” he was still unable to feel normal sensation or emit sperm. Simon was then set upon by two prostitutes, who used their skills “to see if the said Simon could be in any way corrupted.” He was able to achieve an erection but not much else. In the end, Simon lost his right hand and was branded and beaten—savage treatment, to be sure, but still preferable to being burned alive.

The city of Florence used a carrot-and-stick approach to fight sodomy. As discussed, a municipal brothel was chartered to reinforce heterosexual tastes in the city’s young men. The city also established an “Office of the Night,” which put boxes on the streets in which people could leave anonymous sodomy charges against others. Anyone so accused would be interrogated and pressured to name others. The penalties were dropped if the men denounced themselves and identified their partners; about forty men per year did so.

While all sodomy was condemned in Florence, as in Venice it was considered particularly outrageous and embarrassing for grown men to take the “womanly” role. A sixty-three-year-old man condemned to death for passive homosexuality had his sentence reduced to a fine and a lifetime diet of bread and water, but not because anyone forgave him: The authorities were concerned about the bad publicity. To execute a man for acting like a woman sexually would be to admit that such things happened within city limits.

THE SPANISH INQUISITION got into the sodomite-killing business in 1524, when it received permission to go after Don Sancho de la Caballeria, the prominent descendant of a converted Jew. Don Sancho had been one of the Inquisition’s most outspoken critics, and inquisitors had been trying to get him for years. They were unsuccessful until they found a witness willing to denounce him for sodomy. The problem was that the Inquisition had not yet been given authority over sodomy cases in Aragon, where Don Sancho lived. Secular authorities were already terrorizing sodomites, often hanging them upside down with their genitals tied around their necks, but the Inquisition wanted to punish Don Sancho itself. The fight over who would deal with him went all the way to Pope Clement VII, who sided, predictably enough, with the Inquisition, and gave it jurisdiction over sodomy cases in Aragon.

Don Sancho lost his case but died naturally before his appeals were over. However, the Inquisition was just getting started. Hundreds of executions followed in the coming decades, both for homosexual relations and bestiality. In one case, twelve men were publicly burned to death at once. Nine of them were Aragonese peasants charged with raping mules and donkeys; the other three were foreigners convicted of homosexual practices. It must have been a long day, as the executioners had problems collecting enough wood to burn everyone at once.

The Spanish Inquisition also received authority to go after married couples for sex crimes. Several men were burned for having anal intercourse with their wives, while one field hand, accused by his estranged wife of having forced her to perform both oral and anal sex with him, was sentenced to ten years as a slave on a galleon. Whether this miserable life was better than death remains in question, but the inquisitors believed they were being merciful. They had concluded that the man had not been wholly responsible for the crimes, because he had been underage when he had last sodomized his wife.

For many married couples, anal sex was a common form of birth control, but for many men it was also a titillating, if not cruel, pleasure. Records show that girls as young as seven were being stocked in brothels for the purpose, and female prostitutes who dressed as men to attract male clients (and then presumably supplied them with anal sex) were singled out for harsh condemnation. One cannot blame the prostitutes for doing what they could to fulfill marketplace demands, which were skewing toward homosexuality: By 1511, after more than a century of intense repression, Venice’s patriarch announced that sodomy among men was so prevalent that female prostitutes were going out of business.
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WHILE LESS IS known about female-female sex during the medieval period, it seems clear that it was repressed, although not widely. As we have seen, lesbianism was strongly condemned in the penitential handbooks, but later church pronouncements paid little attention to the subject. The first known antilesbian law, from France in 1270, raised more questions than it answered:

He who has been proven to be a sodomite must lose his testicles. And if he does it a second time, he must lose his member. And if he does it a third time, he must be burned. A woman who does this shall lose her member each time, and on the third must be burned.

The drafters of this law had clearly meant to impose the same castration-based penalties on women as on men, but what female “member” were they referring to? If the first offense called for the inflicting of some kind of genital mutilation such as a clitoridectomy, what “member” was the woman to lose the second time? We cannot say. Later antilesbian laws were more specific, and, if possible, even more brutal. A statute from the Italian town of Treviso required that any females older than twelve caught having sexual relations with each other, even for the first time, “be tied naked for a full day to a stake in the Street of Locusts and then burned at the stake.”

For lawmakers, the most immoral aspect of lesbianism occurred when women simulated heterosexual sex. The Inquisition, for example, was not permitted to go after women for having sex with each other unless “artificial instruments” were involved. Women who did not use such objects, inquisitors were told, were not committing sodomy. The same was true elsewhere in Europe, where it was an open question whether or not female-female sex without penetration, or at least without a woman taking on the male role, was sex at all. All legal ambiguities evaporated when a dildo appeared in the bed.

In 1477, Katharina Hetzeldorfer was put to death in Speyer on accusations that she had her “manly will” with other females and “behaved exactly like a man with women.” Hetzeldorfer confessed, presumably after torture, that she had used a “piece of wood that she held between her legs” to simulate a penis, and also that she had “made an instrument with a red piece of leather, at the front filled with cotton, and a wooden stick stuck into it.” It was the contraption and her use of it to pose as a man in the sexual sense that infuriated the judges. In the same way, two amorous nuns in sixteenth-century Spain would likely have survived their legal problems had they not “polluted” themselves by penetrating each other with objects and impersonating men. As it was, they were burned to death.