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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

4. “The Great Poisoning Scare”

Milan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Wikimedia

For months after receiving a royal warning, tensions kept steadily mounting in Milan. The alarmed citizens kept a wary lookout for suspicious characters, and grew steadily more stressed out and frazzled as fears mounted of an imminent poisoning. The city thus sat on a powder keg for months, before finally erupting in what came to be known as “The Great Poisoning Scare of Milan“.

It started on the night of May 17^th, when some citizens reported seeing mysterious people placing what appeared to be poison in a cathedral partition. Health officials went to the cathedral but found no signs of poisoning. The following morning, the Milanese woke to find that all doors on the main streets had been marked with a mysterious daub.

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.