Let’s Talk About Cannibalism In The Middle Ages…

The wind howled like a wounded beast against the cracked, crumbling stone walls of the besieged city, carrying with it the sickening, metallic stench of fresh blood and rotting flesh. Inside the settlement, the world had been violently reduced to a freezing, desolate purgatory. Snow piled high in the narrow, winding alleys, acting as a pristine white shroud over the skeletal remains of those who had simply laid down and surrendered to the agonizing elements. But the cold, however bitter, was merciful compared to the true, insidious enemy: the gnawing, all-consuming fire of starvation. It always began as a dull ache in the belly, a persistent cramp that twisted the guts into hard knots. Then, as the weeks bled into months, that hunger crawled upward, invading the mind, shattering the fragile, sacred boundaries of morality, faith, and human decency. In the suffocating shadows of the barricaded houses, eyes hollowed out by absolute desperation darted frantically. The boiled leather of old shoes had long been chewed into tasteless, gritty pulp. The rough bark had been aggressively stripped from every withered tree within the city limits. Even the diseased rats, once cursed as filthy vermin, had been hunted to utter extinction, their meager, stringy meat fought over with bare, bloody hands in the mud. Men who once knelt in devout prayer in the grand cathedrals now stared with rabid, feral intensity at the weak, the dying, and the already dead. The unthinkable was no longer a feverish nightmare; it was a looming, undeniable, and terrifying reality. A desperate mother clutched her lifeless infant in the freezing dark, not in traditional mourning, but with a terrifying, calculated, and ravenous gaze. A devout brother looked at his fallen sibling and saw not family, but vital sustenance. The fragile veneer of medieval civilization had been violently stripped away, leaving only the primal, terrifying instinct to survive at any absolute cost. The holy laws of God and the decrees of kings meant absolutely nothing to a stomach that was digesting itself. Blood would be spilled, flesh would be torn, and humanity would be willingly cast into the deepest abyss. This was the dark reality of a world pushed to the absolute brink, where the line between man and monster was eagerly devoured in the pitch-black night.

For many people, when they think about medieval history, it conjures up thoughts of castles, jousts, and chivalrous knights. The sort of stories told in historical dramas. The reality was a much more brutal world of war, siege, disease, and famine, things that were a regular occurrence in the Middle Ages. During those times, however, something a lot darker was also happening, something hardly ever spoken about, a social taboo so great that I’m never allowed to talk about it at dinner parties. Cannibalism, the eating of human flesh. Cannibalism is a barbaric act, one of the most horrifying and cruel things that one human can do to another. This is something a million miles away from the gallant knights of the Middle Ages.

However, medieval sources show that cannibalism wasn’t just an act carried out by starving peasants during times of famine. It was quite acceptable for parts of the human body to be used for medicinal purposes, and as we shall see, cannibalism was also carried out just for the hell of it. Let’s travel back in time to the Middle Ages and take a look at what drove the medievals to such extremes and what else they ate to stay alive. Welcome to Medieval Madness. I’m so hungry, I could eat a shoe.

Eating other people to survive usually involves small communities in the midst of a devastating event, such as a siege or a localized famine. During the 14th century, there were 10 recorded famines in the Kingdom of France. They lasted anywhere between 1 and 4 years. England suffered from those 10 and another three more besides. There are 13 cases of cannibalism recorded during acts of warfare or sieges during the Middle Ages. Sieges were commonplace during the Crusades, the fighting that went on between the 11th and 13th centuries between the Christians and the Muslims in their bids to control the Holy Land, especially the city of Jerusalem, sacred to both religions.

One famous episode which happened 2 years into the start of the First Crusade took place in December of 1098 at the Siege of Ma’arra and Numan. The priest Fulcher of Chartres served under Baldwin the First of Jerusalem for many years and kept a chronicle of his participation in the campaign. In the History of the Expedition to Jerusalem, Fulcher wrote:

“Our people suffered excessive hunger. I shudder to speak of it because very many of our people, harassed by the madness of excessive hunger, cut off pieces from the buttocks of the Saracens already dead there, which they cooked and chewed and devoured with savage mouth when insufficiently roasted at the fire.”

Fulcher’s words imply that this was an act of sheer desperation justified by how vitally important their crusade for the Holy Land was. Frenchman Raymond of Aguilers also took part in the First Crusade and recounted his participation in a chronicle. He was chaplain to Count Raymond the Fourth of Toulouse. He wrote:

“Meanwhile, there was so great a famine in the army that the people ate most greedily the many already fetid bodies of the Saracens which they’d already cast into the swamps of the cities 2 weeks and more ago. These events frightened many people of our race as well as outsiders, but the Saracens and the Turks said on the contrary, ‘And who can resist this people who are so obstinate and cruel who now feed on human flesh?’ These and other most cruel practices the pagans said exist among us. For God had given fear of us to all races, but we did not know it.”

Propaganda is always a problem when it comes to the writings of war. An author is always going to give a one-sided view. Raymond’s narration dehumanizes his Muslim enemy, portraying them as predators, the Christians as their prey.

In the early Middle Ages, the Byzantine Empire held the city of Constantinople. Unlike the West, the Eastern Roman Empire survived the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century and endured until Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453. Theophanes the Confessor, who lived in the 8th and 9th centuries, was a member of the aristocracy. After becoming a monk and a chronicler, he described a siege that lasted for 2 years. He noted that the Arabs surrounded the city of Constantinople. Famine broke out and, he noted:

“Since the Arabs were extremely hungry, they ate all their dead animals, horses, asses, and camels. Some even say they put dead men in their own dung in pans, kneaded this, and ate it.”

Well, knowing this, it’s no surprise to learn that:

“A plague-like disease descended upon them and destroyed a countless throng.”

The Chronicle of Zuqnin, possibly written by Joshua the Stylite, added that the Arabs were so hungry they ate their sandals. There is a story of the Arabs being so desperate that they tore strips of pitch from the ships and chewed on it all day to stave off the hunger pangs. And the Muslim scholar and historian al-Tabari agrees that things were so bad the Arabs:

“Ate everything except dust.”

She’s a man-eater. According to Joshua the Stylite, very, very early, in fact, just on the cusp of when the Middle Ages began, between the years of 504 and 505, a war was raging between the Persians and the Byzantine Empire led by the Christian Roman Emperor Anastasius. The ancient city of Amida in Mesopotamia, now modern-day Turkey, was under siege. Once the Persians had taken Amida, it was recorded:

“The population and those who had escaped the sword were in great distress and torment on account of the famine.”

Afraid that the citizens would help to give the city back to the Romans, the Persians tied up all the men who were there and threw them into the amphitheater, where they starved to death. Because the Persian soldiers needed the Amid women to cook for them, they gave them provisions, but when the supplies began to run out, they abandoned the women and left them without food. So, it was stated:

“Many women met together and secretly conspired among themselves. They would go out furtively into the streets of the city at dusk or dawn, and anyone they came across whom they could overpower, whether woman, child, or old man, they would pull indoors, kill, and eat either boiled or roasted.”

When the smell of the meat was detected by the soldiers, the women were tortured and killed. Although the Persian general allowed the women to eat those who were already dead, and they did this quite openly. While some ate the flesh of dead human beings, the others gathered and ate shoes, old soles, and other horrible things from the streets and squares.

According to the Greek scholar and historian Procopius, farming was abandoned in parts of Italy during the Gothic War. In the summer of 539, people fled to the coast in the hope of finding more food there. In Tuscany, the people ground acorns to make bread. All sorts of diseases befell them, and most of them died. Around 50,000 Roman farmers died, and:

“People lost a lot of weight and all color. Furthermore, they lost all moisture from their skin, which looked like leather tightly stretched over bones. People turned from gray to black.”

Two women in a village near Ariminum ate 17 men. Most people died while trying to feed on grass. No one bothered to bury the dead, not even the birds ate them, for there was nothing left on the corpses to feed on. Praying on the weak.

Michael the Syrian wrote his world chronicle in the late 12th century. He told a tale that he said happened around 646 when there was a severe famine in Germanica, modern Marash in Turkey. During that time, people resorted to eating wild animals and other loathsome beasts. He tells us there was an impostor monk and villain named Eleazar who dwelled in a cave. He stole children and ate 51 of them. Then he went and consoled the children’s parents for the loss of their children since they believed he was a monk. He also killed and ate a deacon and was caught by a young priest, handed over to the authorities, and crucified for his crimes.

Around the same time in Lebanon, another grizzly incident was taking place. Two women were sharing a house and one of them had a baby. Unable to find anything to eat during the famine, the mother of the child went out into the fields to gather grass. The other woman with her three conspirators killed the baby, cooked it, and ate it. When the people found out what they had done, they were burned to death.

Mothers were said to have cooked and eaten their own children during the Syrian famine in Jowat of 687. The 11th century Benedictine monk and chronicler Rodulfus Glaber talks about similar events when a famine that lasted 5 years hit large parts of Europe when he says that grown men ate their mothers whilst women did the same to their babies. It is inconceivable to imagine how desperate they were. The magic of medicine.

There are many cases of cannibalism that appeared to have taken place through choice rather than necessity. At the end of the Mongol regime, Tai Zong Yi, celebrated scholar of the Yuan period spanning the 13th and 14th centuries, noted that soldiers from the northern area of China enjoyed eating human flesh just for the sake of it and often killed civilians for their culinary pleasure. He claimed that young children were the most appreciated, roasted whole in large jars, or placed on an iron gate to be roasted alive. Sometimes put inside a bag which was placed into a large pot and boiled alive. Zong Yi stated that bodies not eaten straight away:

“Were cut into pieces that were salted and dried. Sometimes, if it was a man, only his two thighs were chopped off, or if it was a woman, only her two breasts.”

During the Crusades, an interesting feature of cannibalism came to light. Christian and Muslim soldiers alike were said to have been harvesting the corpses of their dead enemies for body parts. It seemed that the gallbladder was particularly sought after as it was believed to have magical or medicinal powers. The first-century author and scientist Pliny the Elder insisted that magic first arose from medicine at the beginning of his book Natural History, and Pliny was highly regarded in the Middle Ages.

Bathing in and imbibing blood had been going on for centuries. The Romans liked to drink the blood of the gladiators, sometimes warm, straight from the fighter’s bleeding wounds as he lay dying in the arena. They thought that it had magical properties and could cure maladies such as epilepsy and other brain disorders. In the 13th century, the acclaimed Scottish scholar Michael Scott declared that bathing in the blood of either a dog or a 2-year-old infant mixed with hot water was a definitive cure for leprosy. This is the worst.

If we travel across to the Far East in China, the Tang Dynasty lasted for about 300 years between the early 7th and 10th centuries. There, the consumption of human flesh was regarded as an extremely effective medical treatment. The Bencao Gangmu was just one of many medical texts that gave prescriptions for potions using human organs, bodily fluids, and excreta. Everything from human earwax to powdered bone and from human breath to the penis were commonly listed as ingredients.

In China, the concept of filial piety, the virtue of giving love and respect for parents and ancestors, led to a unique type of voluntary cannibalism. As young people were supposed to do everything in their power to look after and support their parents and parents-in-law, they would cut off parts of their body and feed it to them as a form of medicine when they were ill. The majority of donors were women, often daughters-in-law of the patient. Creating a tourniquet, the dutiful daughter-in-law would tie her thigh or arm very tightly with a piece of cloth and, using a sharp knife, slice off a piece of flesh from either her upper arm or thigh. The human meat was immediately mixed with hot soup and then offered up to the dying patient. It is thought that this sort of voluntary offering took place from the early 7th century right up until the 20th.

Thank you so much for watching this episode of Medieval Madness. If this video made you hungry, then first of all, what the hell is wrong with you, but secondly, we’ve just uploaded a video to our Patreon and YouTube memberships about favorite medieval foods across different countries. If this is something you’re interested in and you want to help support the channel, it’s only £3 a month to join. Or for those on our higher tier, you get your name on screen like all of these lovely people right now. We really do appreciate all the support you guys have been giving us and we just want to keep making the best medieval content that we possibly can. So, until next time, I hope everyone has a great week and I’ll see you in the next video. Cheers.

The echoes of these medieval horrors did not simply vanish when the famines broke, nor did the dark trade in human flesh cease when the castle gates were finally reopened. As Europe slowly transitioned out of the darkest centuries of the Middle Ages, the psychological scars left by widespread cannibalism morphed into something entirely different. The desperation of the stomach became an engineered industry of the elite. When the fields finally turned green again and the common folk returned to their plows, the memory of human flesh shifted from a shame hidden in the shadows to a dark commodity discussed in whispers within the highest chambers of European power. The desperation did not die; it merely changed its clothes, shedding the rags of the starving peasant to put on the velvet robes of the wealthy and the learned.

As the years rolled on, the practices that began as frantic military survival at sieges like Ma’arra or Amida laid the conceptual groundwork for a highly organized, systemic exploitation of human remains that would haunt the continent for centuries. Apothecaries and scholars, building directly upon the ancient assertions of Pliny the Elder and the 13th-century experiments of figures like Michael Scott, looked toward the dead not with religious terror, but with a cold, calculating commercial gaze. They reasoned that if a dying crusader could find vital strength by consuming his foe, or if a Roman emperor could seek longevity through blood, then the human corpse itself must be the ultimate repository of unspent life force.

This belief gave rise to a sprawling, illicit trading network that stretched from the desecrated catacombs of Egypt to the royal courts of London, Paris, and Madrid. The demand for human remains as medicine skyrocketed. No longer was it a matter of an isolated imposter monk like Eleazar hunting children in a cave out of sheer madness; now, respected merchants and licensed grave diggers became the silent predators of the night. They hunted the newly buried, the executed, and the forgotten to supply an insatiable market that believed death could be cheated if one simply ingested the dead.

The most prized substance in this macabre commerce was mummy, or mumia. Originally derived from natural asphalt found in the Middle East, the definition rapidly shifted due to high demand and short supply. European medical authorities began to demand actual mummified human flesh. Shippers imported thousands of desiccated bodies from ancient Egyptian tombs, which were then systematically chopped, ground into fine black powder, and packed into apothecary jars across Germany, England, and France. When the supply of ancient mummies ran thin, unscrupulous merchants simply created their own. They harvested the bodies of executed criminals, beggars, or those who had drowned, treated the flesh with pitch and herbs, dried it in ovens, and sold it to the wealthy elite as authentic ancient medicine.

This was not a practice confined to the superstitious poor. The absolute highest echelons of society were active participants. Royal families consumed human remains regularly. King Charles II of England was famous for drinking “The King’s Drops,” a highly potent personal tincture made from fine human skull powder dissolved in rich alcohol. The logic of the court physicians was absolute: a person who died violently or suddenly retained their vital spirit within their bones, and by drinking the powder of their shattered skull, a living monarch could absorb that stolen vitality to cure his own ailments. The royal laboratories were constantly lit, distilling the remnants of the dead into smooth elixirs for the crown.

The execution docks and public gallows of major European cities became the primary hunting grounds for this clinical cannibalism. Whenever a criminal was sentenced to hang, a desperate crowd would gather at the base of the scaffolding, not just to watch the execution, but to fight for the immediate byproducts of the death. The moment the trapdoor dropped and the body grew still, people would rush forward with small cups, begging the executioner for permission to catch the warm, spraying blood as it dripped from the corpse. It was firmly believed that the fresh blood of a young, healthy person cut down in their prime was a sovereign cure for epilepsy, palsy, and physical wasting. The executioner became a merchant of flesh, selling access to the warm corpse to the highest bidder.

In the pharmacies of Europe, human fat became a highly sought-after ointment for joint pain, arthritis, and muscle withered by disease. Poor families and professional body snatchers would wait until the dead of night to dig up fresh graves, using custom wooden spades that made little noise against the earth. They would swiftly extract the corpses, strip them of their fat and skin, and sell the raw materials to local medical practitioners who boiled the tissue down into smooth, expensive salves. A person’s final resting place was no longer a sacred sanctuary; it was merely a resource to be harvested by the living.

Simultaneously, the dark accounts of soldiers consuming human organs for tactical power during the Crusades evolved into structured military traditions in certain mercenary bands. In the brutal wars of religion that tore across the European continent, stories emerged of specialized units who purposely consumed the hearts or livers of fallen enemy commanders. They did this not out of starvation, but to actively steal the courage, tactical brilliance, and battlefield prowess of their foes. The act of cannibalism became a supreme psychological weapon, a method to utterly break the morale of an opposing army by showing them that defeat meant not just death, but complete consumption.

This transition from survival cannibalism to medicinal and ritual consumption created a strange, profound hypocrisy in the European mindset. While explorers and sailors traveling across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were writing home with absolute horror about the savage, barbaric man-eating practices of indigenous tribes they encountered in the New World, those very same writers were regularly purchasing human skull powder, drinking human blood at the gallows, and rubbing human fat onto their aching limbs at home. The global trade in human bodies was viewed as highly scientific and civilized, while the survival practices of distant cultures were deemed monstrous.

Even the ancient, peaceful concepts of filial piety seen in the Far East began to intersect with the expanding trade routes of the West. As European merchants established permanent footholds in Asian trading ports, they documented with fascination and horror the continued practice of daughters-in-law slicing their own flesh to feed their dying elders. Yet, rather than understanding the deep cultural sacrifice behind the act, Western opportunists attempted to purchase these prepared, filial remedies, hoping to bottle and export the ultimate symbol of familial devotion as an exotic longevity serum for European aristocrats who wished to live forever.

The historical reality remains clear: the dark, hidden history of cannibalism never truly belonged solely to the starving peasant or the besieged soldier trapped behind frozen walls. It was a persistent thread woven directly into the fabric of human survival, science, and power. From the blood-soaked sands of the Roman arenas and the desperate, muddy trenches of Ma’arra, to the pristine, velvet-lined laboratories of royal palaces, humanity has consistently looked upon its own kind as a source of life, food, and medicine. The line between civilized man and feral beast was never as thick as the chivalric stories claim; it was always as thin as a single sheet of paper, easily torn away by the desperate urge to survive, to heal, or to dominate.