Medieval Executioners | You Wouldn't Invite Him to Dinner, Would Absolutely Call Him at 2am

The city needed someone to carry out its justice, so it hired a guy, made him essential, and then treated him like a walking biohazard. This week we ruin the executioner: specifically Franz "Meister Frantz" Schmidt of Nuremberg, who killed almost 400 people, treated something like 15,000 patients as an unlicensed healer, and spent his retirement personally petitioning the Holy Roman Emperor so his kids could get married without the shame following them.

What we cover:

• Why "dishonorable trades" existed and why they were hereditary (spoiler: nobody applied for this job, it just landed on you)

• Franz's first solo hanging at 19, and what "adroitly" meant as a job review

• The insane precision expected of an executioner and what happened if he screwed it up

• The weirdly bureaucratic version of mercy that existed inside all this cruelty

• Franz's medical side hustle, which somehow dwarfed his execution work

• Corpse medicine, briefly, because it's genuinely its own episode

• How a man who did exactly what the state asked of him for 45 years spent the rest of his life trying to prove his own family wasn't dangerous

Games this episode:

• Dishonorable trade or just kind of gross?

• Why would we be executed?

5 Fast Facts at the end, because we always have more than we have time for.

Coming soon: a corpse medicine bonus episode. Human fat, powdered skull, the English gallows-hand tradition. All of it.

Sources:

• The Executioner's Journal, trans. Joel F. Harrington

• Joel F. Harrington, The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century

• Richard Ward, "A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse"