36. The Duke of Bavaria chucked his son’s lover, Agnes Bernauer, in the Danube for witchcraft
In 1435, a young nobleman named Albrecht, heir to the Dukedom of Bavaria, fell in love with a commoner. Agnes Bernauer’s father ran a bathhouse in Augsburg; Albrecht’s owned Bavaria. He promised Agnes marriage, and gave her a lady-in-waiting. To stop his son marrying a commoner, furious Duke Ernst waited until Albrecht was away, and accused Agnes of witchcraft. He chucked her in the Danube to ‘see if she’d float’. People thought witches would float, because they’d spurned the sacrament of baptism and so the water would reject them. Agnes unsurprisingly drowned, and poor Albrecht was heartbroken.
