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The Old World’s Medieval Untouchables and Other Random Historical Facts

Khalid Elhassan March 17, 2020 33 min

Pancho Villa - Mexican Revolution — General Pancho Villa before a firing squad in 1912. Wikimedia

5. When Europe Was Swept By Poisoning Panics

Seventeenth-century Europeans were prone to paranoid episodes about poisoning. They seemed to have a standing fear that nefarious people planned to spread a plague throughout Christendom via sinister means, such as sorcery and witchcraft, or mysterious “poisonous gasses”.

Such fears led to a great panic that swept the city of Milan, Italy. It began in 1629, after the city’s governor received an alarming message from King Philip IV of Spain. It warned the governor to be on the lookout for four Frenchman who had escaped from a Spanish prison, and might be en route to Milan to spread the plague via “poisonous and pestilential ointments“.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.