1361: The Medieval Massacre Of Sweden | Medieval Dead | Chronicle

[Music] july the 27th 1361 on the isle of gotland before the fortified walls of a great city a militia awaits an invading enemy they're all that lies between survival or destruction at the hands of a ruthless foe professional soldiers and hired mercenaries [Music] who were these people are what made them fight and die together more than 600 years later an international group of archaeologists is attempting to find out more they'll investigate some of the fines from the largest mass grave from a medieval battle ever found if you win or lose a battle it's a momentous occasion for either the victors or the losers they'll try to shed light on the men who wore this armor and fought this battle that's a foot that's been cut off that's incredible how they made their last stand and paid the ultimate sacrifice the medieval world the fifth to the 15th century a team of archaeologists investigates medieval life by exploring the world of the medieval dead we have a classic view of the storybook medieval life we don't hear the stories about the common man transcended family alive in our stores there are hundreds if not thousands of skeletons archaeologically speaking we can now focus in on the medieval deaf people you're looking for clues in the skeleton all the time and you couldn't help almost look through their eyes what did they see how did they die houses have been put to the torch grieving people stricken by the sword like a dog he hurries with a sword and gotland is conquered by the danes the words of inscriptions found hidden in churches and monasteries of gotland from 1361 bitter words by a beaten people the swedish isle of gotland in the baltic sea has been free of war for 200 years yet in the centuries before its history was anything but bloodless in the middle ages gotland was the richest city in the baltic it was a hub for seafaring trade and commerce dating back to viking times there are more hordes of coins and treasure found here than anywhere else the middle years of the 1300s were a golden age for gotham most of all for its glittering capital visby no wonder then that this rich island drew envious eyes from across the baltic 1361 proved a pivotal year for visby and the gotlanders as archaeologists we're really interested in these periods of transition and there's nothing that displays one of these transitions better than a battle or a conflict because usually there is an outcome that's very decisive and that period of transition is not large scale it can be down to hours minutes days or whatever but it's certainly not yours and if you find the mass grave of a people who were killed during that conflict that's perfect because that is the moment when the transition took place so you can find out what happened before what happened afterwards and this is the point where it took off and this is just a catalyst on this island and because it's an island it's a very small insular sort of activity but it has repercussions across the whole of the the events of 1361 in gotland captivate medieval historians and archaeologists [Music] the story comes to us from different sources few gotlanders were left alive to tell the tale king voldemort iv of denmark invaded the island with a large army of danish and german mercenary troops the gotlanders without a standing army formed a militia to try and stop them but they were pushed back to visby it was not an even contest yet the militia stood their ground the gotlanders were annihilated by the professional danish and german soldiers the island was stripped of its riches and never again flourished as it had done in past centuries it was the end of the golden age the story might have remained nearly forgotten in the history books were it not for a chance discovery more than five and a half centuries later in 1905 a large grave was discovered outside the old town of bisbee traditionally the site of the gotlanders last stand commemorated by a great stone cross in the grave were hundreds of skeletons in 1928 three more pits were found with hundreds more the visby mass graves were a worldwide sensation among the most important finds ever made in medieval archaeology the finds were extraordinary more than eleven hundred complete skeletons i think frisbee you could quite easily say it's unique it's an assemblage of human remains that were discovered in the early 20th century that of people that died during battle it's mind-blowing really in terms of the evidence you can acquire from a grave such as that i can't think of another example where people were buried in their armor finding the people that died in battle in masquerades with their arms and armor is phenomenally rare in fact she's virtually unique when i first came across this assemblage and i first heard about the battle of visby i thought that obviously it's just another battlefield masquerade and so when i first saw the information that was compiled in the early 20th century and there were plates of armor on the skeleton itself and you think this is unbelievable it's so unusual and the mind races to try to work out so many questions why were they buried like this what sort of armor was it how effective was it what were the people like but but as an assemblage it's so important and it really makes your mind race and it it builds up a picture of what presumably happened on that day the events of 1361 caused a deep scar that took generations to heal even now it casts a shadow down the centuries [Music] this is why historians and researchers today more than 80 years after the last excavations are compelled to revisit the story tim sutherland has come to gotland to add what he can to the ongoing research into the events of 1361. he's a specialist in medieval archaeology particularly battlefield archaeology in 1996 he excavated the mass grave from the medieval battle of towton in northern england now he's hoping to put that experience to use here the grave site is a few hundred meters from the walls of visby the battlefield itself has long since been destroyed by modern development but it's likely this area was chosen as a burial place because there was a monastery here at the time of the battle and it would have been close enough to drag or carry large numbers of dead he'll carry out a survey of the site where the mass graves were excavated to establish exactly where the pits were they haven't been touched since they were back filled after the original excavations the good thing about this area is it contains the monuments not only the medieval monuments of the the stone cross but we've got a modern monument of the wooden cross which stands in the center of the church the graves are under the pavement they're under the road they're under the grass they're even under this garden and the house next to us and so the interesting thing is how much of any part of this can we see we've already got the grid laid out i'm just going to extend it by a meter maybe two meters run some lines just up there and then we can just get going working with tim is dr helen goodchild of the university of york she's a specialist in remote sensing including ground penetrating radar the radar may be able to show the graves although there's no way of knowing just how much the site has been disturbed over the past 80 years we can survey through the pavement and hopefully get evidence of the masquerade then we want to just move slowly across the grass getting more data as we move towards the cross hopefully we'll see evidence of at least one or two of these graves but that's the challenge here can we see any evidence of the archaeological remains that exist here from the battle of visby back in 1928 swedish archaeologist bengt tournament began his own survey by looking for the area that had been excavated in 1905 he not only found this but also three more mass graves the dig had to expand to an unprecedented scale to recover all the material yet after almost a year there was still one entire grave left unexcavated this grave grave 4 is believed to be at the edge of the site still down there untouched the reason they stopped excavating is that the just had too many bodies they had three existing graves which were all full some of which had chain mail crafts gauntlets shirts and there were even some plate armor in there as well and so by the time they'd excavated one two three graves they came across grade four and they thought there's no need to excavate this and so luckily for us they left it in place what seemed as though it would be a straightforward survey hasn't been as easy as they thought all under the field are the buried ruins of the old monastery it started out quite traumatic in that there are big thorn bushes in the way there are lots and lots of undulations in the ground we thought it was a very flat green piece of grass and it's covered in lumps bumps and also um stone walls so the radar was bouncing up all over them so although it was very hard work and we've only covered a relatively small air small area that the results seem to be really good the experience has left him with a strong respect for the archaeologists who surveyed this site more than 80 years ago you can't help but admire the people in the past because they had very basic equipment theatre theodolites tape measures and the spade and the trowel and yet they came up with so much quality data and we should look back at these people with reverence and say actually they were very very good at what they did and we can learn a lot from them because they accumulated very good data but at a very basic level and we now following their footsteps and say can we improve on what they've done and sometimes it's quite difficult actually because it's just such good work that they've done they plot the results and see if any of the archaeology can be seen now although this is uh still grass in the house and gardens we can see what they found so we can use this to interpret our data as tim had feared there's a lot of modern interference the problem is we've got several hundred views of archaeology including very very modern features when they strip this away they can see the medieval archaeology so we've got where the graves were where the railings were where the cross still is and all the water pipes and anything else they encountered so anything that's shaded there is where they've excavated now although this is uh still grass in the house and gardens we can see what they found the empty pits left after toured him and excavated them show up clearly grave one right in the road grade two half in the road grade three almost under part of the railings and they've successfully verified grave four completely unexcavated under the pavement and then grade four this is the one that was never fully excavated it still exists in its primary form about a meter below the surface then tim sees something else they weren't expecting so we've got this strange anomaly there which we think may be something like a pit the good news is nobody's excavated there it doesn't look like modern interference could it be from 1361. that's interesting and that looks more archaeological looks like an archaeological pit grave iv alone might contain many more skeletons and armor and now tiemann helen's survey has found another possible grave to be investigated future excavations will benefit from tim and helen's work on july the 22nd 1361 valdemar's invasion force landed some 15 miles to the south of visby at vasigan where the bay funds a natural harbour then they headed north the gotland militia fought at least one battle to try and head off the invaders but they were beaten back the militia fell back to the only fortified town on the island visby yet the great gates were closed to them the visbians would not allow them inside the city wall despite their protests they were left to take their chances and face the invaders their backs to the wall the scene was set for their brave but ill-fated last stand at visible the visby defenses were strong enough to hold out why did they not let the gotlanders in the ring wall is a symbol of the city today it's protected as visby is a world heritage site but in 1361 for the militia outside the gates the ring wall meant the difference between life and death cotton was in the middle of the baltic which made it very rich because you can trade from the east to the west of the west to the east and the kotlin people were good traders visby was one of the trading hot spots of the baltic with waterfront warehouses whitewashed buildings and a safe harbor it was a stone town a medieval manhattan with a high white buildings and you have lots of churches inside this bay and we have this ring wall it must just be astonishing to to come to this day these were prosperous times people of many different nationalities came here drawn by a city built for trading this was very cosmopolitan and there were it was an international town with many different people here there were germans there were russians there were english men and there were gotlanders trading side by side in the town so when the invasion came why didn't they open up to the gotlanders we think that they got any people wanted help from bisbee but bisbeetown decided to negotiate instead and maybe that's why they don't open the gates to let the kotlinic people in maybe they were afraid to to get their army into their town so then they let their peasants die just outside the wall the great ring wall was not just built for defense against overseas invaders there was tension between the gotlandic farmers and the visby officials who controlled trade on the island the war was built to get the farmers to pay to get into the trading in visby because the people in this we want to want to have their trading center for themselves and make them their own money a city wall to force the indigenous farmers to pay to enter and sell their goods at market such was the schism that existed between the islanders and the visben merchants why did they choose to fight this day they must have known that they should be killed probably all of them just staying there with a wall behind you and a well-trained mercenary army just coming towards you that makes no sense that they still wanted to to fight this army and and they did in late spring 1361 the gotlanders received warning that an invasion was imminent they had to work fast with no formal army they had just weeks to raise the militia to train and to armor up the danish army inflicted a terrible defeat on the gotlanders yet little is known about exactly what happened during the final battle yet thanks to the excavations there is physical evidence for what happened visby is unique in archaeology because many of the gotlanders went to the grave still wearing the armor that they'd fought and died in it's this armor that karen watts of britain's royal armouries has come to see it's here in stockholm that most of the armor is stored karen has spent her entire career studying european arms and armor and again as with tim visby is one of the reasons she became passionate about the best subject i've ever seen it's just wonderful the most iconic items among the visby collection are the body armors any kind of armor from this time in the middle ages is extremely rare here though there's a whole range of armors all worn in battle together then buried at the same time it's an unparalleled insight into how medieval soldiers faced battle it's the only armor excavated through a battle anywhere in the world ever the types of armours are known as coat of plates and lamella they're made up of individually forged pieces of iron riveted or wired together as part of a leather or textile harness with several complete armors together it's possible for karen to see how each was tailored to suit individual combatants i can't believe the size look it's for it's for a boy there's actually i have never realized that they're different sizes thomas neyman is a serving swedish army officer he studied all the 1361 armours painstakingly reconstructed here after they were recovered from the mass graves tourdemon identified a number of types at different stages of development is it four different types of armors so you can see it evolving in this difference absolutely from from this piece if you look up here what we see here is the different layers of textile that's been metalized so now it's metal yes i see and what i counted to so far is three layers but it could be more but we have to do more research the most common armors are the coat of plates type a kind of medieval flak jacket all of these armors are purely functional they are fighting military equipment with no adornment or ornamentation except for this one because this one has got brass plaques it's there as a purely an example of a heraldic display and have you identified whom this belongs that's one of the interesting things is a lot of theories and what it could be yeah one of the theories is that it could be a family down in london yeah gorda but we actually don't know because it could be because it's one person missing from that family some of the skeletons had the remains of male armor still on them such as these hoods or quaffs it's rare enough to find single male links from most medieval battle sites so entire shirts and crafts like these are extremely unusual one of the key mysteries surrounding the burials is why so much armor was left on the bodies and not first strid various explanations have been put forward such as the hot weather at the time of the battle the risk of disease or just that there were too many bodies to bury and too few left alive to do the job in the first mass grave you you can see how they've been neatly buried side by side but in the end they are just thrown into the pit with everything and you even find coins and knives and quite valuable items as well so they have been a hurry for their last days mostly been horrible experience to to get all those bodies into the pits why on earth would you bury these people with all this very very expensive equipment with them and there are all sorts of potential answers one of the answers is that basically there was no time to strip which is a bit vague um down to the the extreme possibility that you couldn't actually get the armor off of them if it's the heat of the day all the bodies have been left for a few days uh in an intense heat and they all start bloating you won't be able to get the chain male often it's as simple as that and so you would probably have to start butchering the bodies to get the the male of them and the armor in which case are they prepared to do this their bodies are hot stinking and festered and of course you might think it's not that valuable and so you bury it the good news about burying somebody in their armor in a place that's marked by a large cross is you can come back in five years one year or whatever and you can come and take them off skeletons rather than off fleshed bodies and so that's the one the thing that makes more sense is that they were going to come back for these bodies and they never did metal was an expensive commodity but what if the armor was obsolete could that be why they left it and didn't come back a normal was very valuable so we think that they put their armors in the masquerades because it was hot you had to to get rid of it quite fast but also that the equipment was old some of the armors the plate armors are still modern at this time but some of them are more viking style then it's really old another reason might be that access to the burials may have been restricted by the conquerors this also suggests that they weren't possibly weren't allowed to they weren't allowed to strip the debt and it was only the victors that were allowed access to all this now if they had enough equipment and they didn't particularly want to bother themselves by stripping all the debt they might not have allowed anybody else to do it remember this is armor and there are weapons and so it could be that they wanted to hide their armor anyway to stop the gotlanders getting access to it so what better way than burying it and it's a way of getting rid of a potential problem in the future the coat of plates and lamella armours were transitional systems by 1361 these were being superseded by more sophisticated full plate armor for most professional men at arms like the danish and german mercenaries the gotlanders were up against as everybody thinks these things are amazingly archaic and old-fashioned but they're leading towards what is going to be the solid breastplate and people who are having to wear where body protection needs something that is flexible something that you can run in something that you can move in but a rigid body protection is an advantage over male male is flexible it's very good it protects you against sword cuts but it doesn't protect you from heavy percussive blows if you're hit with a heavy blunt instrument they know that male is good because it's very flexible but they want plate and they spend 150 years trying to evolve plate this is a massive technological improvement when you can shape large plates the visby collection is very important it's almost the missing link in the evolution of european medieval armor in terms of technology in terms of whoever designed this one this one is on the right track this is the one that is going to evolve into the final armor all of these are showing invention as showing the desire to find the perfect armor the well-equipped danish men at arms and professional german mercenaries of waldemar's army probably took anything of value left over after the battle especially items that were easily removed like helmets of which none has ever been found at bisbee the weapons and the helmets are taken care of and they are quite easy to take off and you can also reuse the material the iron itself it's good even if the helmet is old or damaged i think it was old and it was messy sitting to those skulls that were smashed into pieces [Music] but what are the remains of the gotlanders themselves what evidence still lies in their bones marlin holst is an osteo archaeologist a specialist in skeletal remains she's come to stockholm to see for herself a selection of some of the bones from visby she wants to find out more about the collection how the bones were classified and conserved i don't normally approach the medieval period as a touchy feely romantic thing i just try to be scientific about it and try to see what's there and take what's there as fact and then interpret from there when i do analyze medieval skeletons i do see their daily lives from their bones and also from the context they were found in in the medieval period you don't normally have grave goods but you might see markers on their bones that suggest certain activities or fractures of certain bones or particular wear on the teeth that give a clue about their daily lives marlin's osteological work has involved in-depth study of the only other mass grave from a medieval battlefield at towton with around 100 skeletons here in the stores at stockholm's historical museum there are more than ten times the number of skeletons recovered from towton we visually analyzed the skeleton so we determine the age the sex the living height and any diseases the person suffered from or any injuries they suffered from it's usually not possible to tell the cause of death osteoarchaeology works very much together with archaeology and it's very very important for us to work together and communicate with each other because if i just study a skeleton it only tells me a limited amount of information but if i then put it into the archaeological context and see what the grave was like what the site was like what the general areas like that the individual came from then i understand much much more about the individual the excavations were very meticulous for the time to take care of all the skeletons because uh they had a great interest in the military history and all the cuts on the bones were very interesting to them right but we have another interest in the bones because we want to learn more about the people yeah osteology was a relatively new science petter ackerson has studied the skeletons for much of his professional life probably more than anyone else he's looked at the ways in which techniques of analysis in the 1930s differed from current 21st century osteology due to the sheer amount of material little work has been done on them since they were excavated the best part of a century ago since then methods and attitudes not to mention technology have changed but this is also an example of how how the skeletons have become mixed so this is a box with a crania and tibia and one femur the bones were not kept together in their individual skeletons archaeological methods were different in tournaments time the site was gridded and excavated strictly square by square if there were bones from one skeleton they marked them so they could see each skeleton today the accepted method is to excavate each individual skeleton completely one at a time keeping all the bones together in context what isn't of use to contemporary means of analysis might still be useful in the future if the whole skeleton is stored together in some cases you have all the thigh bones in boxes in one box and the other bones in other boxes so our work was a bit tedious trying to figure out which pieces belong to which skeleton the sheer number of skeletons makes it very time consuming to conserve them petter and other osteologists have spent many hours placing back together the visby skeletons some haven't been looked at since they were packed away for storage yet it gives a unique cross-section of the types of wounds sustained in a medieval battle almost every skeleton has some evidence of trauma tordeman's analysis was the first step towards revealing more about the individuals in the mass graves his work paved the way for modern osteology the evidence is in the bones to be able to give them something back hopefully we'll probably never be able to give them their name back but what you could say right this person was of a certain height of a certain stature of a certain robusticity and they looked like they you know they did some honest hard grafting and and they suffered in life like they had a broken limb or a broken finger and you can see all this on the skeletal remains all these skeletons that now remain of these people they need to tell their story and i try to be their voice to be able to see them through their eyes and say right fair enough this this is how they lived their life until eventually one day they died for whatever reason whether it was young or old whether it was alone or whether it was with a family and friends you could have died in a battle and you would have been tossed into a mass grave with very large amounts of people completely anonymously and that's where they stayed and to be able to see their life almost through their eyes i think it's very important because i've been told by soldiers serving today that one of their dreads is to die anonymously unknown and then be buried with nobody knowing where they are who they were and what it's all about how they died and so to cert to a certain degree archaeologists can help an individual from a long time ago have some sort of saying you know in the future you know this is who i was this is what i did this is how i lived my life and potentially this is how i died it's always difficult to say in a battle situation uh where do the the injuries uh hit the body you i mean it's in the turmoil of the battle you can get a blow from from any part from any distance and you don't really know they had no chance because they the invaders were so much better at fighting and more experienced the most common wounds are from bladed weapons most likely swords as he worked his way through hundreds of skeletons have found blade trauma on many of them and you often see this just multiple cuts on each bone and just this one is is interesting as well since it's from not an adult actually no it's it's just fusing yeah yeah how old would you say 17 18. yes so yeah that's very interesting and this it's also the inside of the shin so how do you think why do you think there are so many cut marks on a on a shin bone were they on a horse maybe or no i think these were the gotlandic peasants and the danish army knew that probably the people they were about to kill they didn't have that much protection on their bone on their legs so they just aimed low all right and cut and cut and cut to disable them yeah exactly but there must be about six cuts on here and we often see that five six seven cuts really yeah and are they generally concentrated on the legs all on the lower leg so mostly on the lower legs but there also are some wounds on the thigh bones but yes then we see that it's on on the lower part of them what what what is this is this a cut mark yes well that's a foot that's been cut off that is incredible this is the lower legs the bones of the lower leg here yes that have been cut off and they've literally been sliced in half yes and there are many examples of of feet being chopped off yes and sometimes both feet with just one blow that's incredible so the danish army must have had very good weapons oh yes and the right technique yes it seems that it was a deliberate strategy to chop off well chop at the legs actually yes so here we have a cut yes and here you can see that there's almost uh like markings that you can see that the sword or whatever weapon was used was dented all right so that you see these lines yes so you think that's due to a damaged sword uh yes i think so otherwise when you see the cuts they're always really really clean and smooth yeah yeah but this one has this this like a pattern again it's a another injury down here isn't it and the the bone was cut down and then the rest broke off yeah the the end bit so the whole leg was cut in half petter has found that many of the gotlanders suffered injuries like this more than a third of the shin bones have cut marks on them and not only one cut on many of them the danish army have hit the atlantic farmers many times on the lower parts of their legs why were these injuries so frequent thomas helps them investigate almost all the cuts are to the lower legs and they're so low down so how would you deliver that sort of blow yeah now i'm not going to be too vivid of course with the range of the sword you can easily hit the lower part of the bone without bending down yeah but while you're doing that you might be getting attacked by peta's sword yeah so you're making yourself more vulnerable yeah exactly and therefore you have a shield if you don't have a shield just hold him and then cut the cathode a little bit all right but you need to be pretty brave too and also experience yeah but if you have training for example if you're a farmer perhaps you don't have a sword you have a spear yeah then you can take hold of the spear and hold it and then make the cut all right then it's no worries for you and peta was saying that sometimes both legs were cut as if in one blow it's not possible with the support i think so not because i've done it but it's so sharp so i think so to make a cut like that you don't need that much force but there's some like this one here this is the foot yeah so where the leg has been cut through from the inside exactly and the whole heel and there are lots of muscles here and it has a sort of glanced yeah during the yeah the blue as well yeah and that i think is pretty natural when you do the cut because um see without the cutting cutter here when you when you come from a bow and make the cut when the the length of the arm stops it's it burns easier yeah yeah so it could be natural in the cut that it actually burns because of the yeah the range of the arm yeah if you uh look at what kind of armor the peasants of kotlin will probably protect the upper body and the head and if you're not trained it's hard to protect the legs the most important first thing is to get their opponent down on the ground and then they could have been finished exactly cut them in the legs get them down on the ground and then finish them off yeah it's very effective to to take the legs off because you won't fight more and we scream more and if you hear your brother screaming next to you you won't fight that good anymore many of the skulls have rhomboidal trauma marks some of these may have been caused by crossbow bolts but most were probably due to warhammers the danish army used these weapons with hideous efficiency probably to finish off men already wounded by the swords sometimes when you pick up a cranial with a big hole in it you just put it down and had to go and take some coffee and take a break for a while it disturbs you what people can do to each other and here's an interesting one so it's the top of the skull with some kind of arrow in it and you can see that the arrow has struck him right in the middle of the forehead and that must have been fatal mustn't it i mean oh yes this is right into the brain among the militia were the old the infirm the young even the physically disabled buried in outdated armor that wasn't even worth salvaging from the corpses why were these people left to face the danish army with its trained knights and professional mercenaries they had to go out and fight against this well-trained army and they didn't know what to expect but they were all just slaughtered despite the terrible suffering evidenced in the bones there is also the truth that the gotlanders fought and died in a brave yet hopeless last stand families fathers brothers and sons who died trying to protect their homes and loved ones if you win or lose a battle it's a momentous occasion for either the victors or the losers and when this happens on a national scale it means that massive changes take place across a whole country maybe even a whole continent and so when you see evidence of a battle you can pick out what was happening to each side and these people in the graves presumably most of them are the losers the fact that gotland has lost and the danes won means that the now is a sea change across the whole of that island and the gotlanders who were phenomenally wealthy people suddenly are ruled by somebody from an external country the physical remains in stockholm and visby serve as lasting monuments to the heroism and tragedy of 1361 the gotlanders themselves and the grey walls that denied them safety you

Channel: Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries

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Keywords: history documentary, medieval history documentary, middle ages, medieval history, the middle ages, medieval battle documentary, medieval battle royale, medieval battles real life, medieval battles history, history of massacre, bloody battles history, bloody battles in history, middle ages documentary history channel, middle ages documentary bbc, early middle ages documentary, medieval scandinavia, medieval scandinavian castles, weird history, funny history, denmark history

Id: hgLZ2jFhvEU

Length: 46min 2sec (2762 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 18 2021