Today’s modern fascination with true crime is nothing new – our early modern ancestors also devoured sensational stories of brutal deaths and shocking, unexplained crimes. Speaking to Ellie Cawthorne, Blessin Adams delves into several sensational murder cases from between 1500 and 1700 to explore what they can reveal about society at the time.

Blessin Adams is the author of Great and Horrible News: Murder and Mayhem in Early Modern Britain (HarperCollins, 2023)

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Bingham had been scrambling ever upwards – often on hands and knees – for hours now. His legs ached, his clothes were damp with sweat, and his lungs struggled to take in the increasingly thin mountain air. And for what? A vague promise from a local man called Melchor Arteaga of Inca ruins at the top of a nearby precipice. For all Bingham knew, Arteaga could have been sending him on a wild – and exhausting – goose chase.

But then Bingham’s weary legs felt a surge of energy. For he and his guides suddenly came across what he later described as “an unexpected sight, a great flight of beautifully constructed stone terraces, perhaps a hundred of them, each hundreds of feet long and ten feet high”.

Then, “suddenly I found myself confronted with the walls of ruined houses built of the finest quality of Inca stonework”.

He had discovered the long-lost Inca city of Machu Picchu, and – though he couldn’t have known it at the time – it was to prove one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century.

On the podcast | Bill Sillar answers listener questions about the mighty South American empire

Hiram Bingham III is sometimes hailed as a kind of proto-Indiana Jones – a buccaneering archaeologist-turned-adventurer who felt more at home in the middle of a jungle than buried in a textbook. He developed a passion for Latin American history as a boy and, armed with a PhD in the subject, made the journey to Yale University to pursue a career as a lecturer. He might have stayed at Yale, had he not met and married Alfreda Mitchell, an heiress to the Tiffany jewellery fortune. Bingham now had the financial security to fulfil his dream – embark on his first expedition to South America.

That first adventure, in 1906, saw him trace the celebrated political leader Simón Bolívar’s routes through Venezuela and Colombia in 1819. But it was a people who dominated South America 300 years before Bolívar who really fired Bingham’s imagination, and ultimately led him to that first, historic sighting of Machu Picchu. They were the Inca.

What happened to Machu Picchu?

Over the course of a few hundred years from the 12th century AD, the Inca forged one of the greatest empires the world had yet seen. They were warriors, conquerors, architects and road-builders extraordinaire, presiding over a vast swathe of territory that ran 2,500 miles down South America’s western seaboard. Unfortunately for them, however, they also developed an obsession with gold.

For in 1532, a ruthless Spanish conquistador named Francisco Pizarro stepped onto Inca territory, accompanied by around 180 followers. Pizarro shared the Inca’s infatuation and, hearing tales of their vast and exquisite stores of yellow metal, made a beeline for their emperor, Atahualpa.

In the long, and sometimes undistinguished history of European colonialism, what happened next has gone down in infamy.

• Read more | The last days of the Inca

In November 1532, Pizarro invited Atahualpa to a meeting in the town of Cajamarca. But the conquistador had a nasty surprise for his host. Having lured Atahualpa and his followers into a plaza, Pizarro’s men attacked, unleashing volleys of gunfire into the unarmed Inca masses. Many were killed and Atahualpa was taken hostage.

To earn his freedom, the emperor reportedly offered Pizarro a ransom that would make the conquistador fantastically rich – a room full of gold, and two full of silver. Almost immediately, gold started pouring in from across the Inca empire. But the Spanish reneged on their promise to release Atahualpa, and instead had him executed.

It was an act that triggered all-out war; a triumph of military technology over weight of numbers. The Spanish could only call upon a couple of hundred men – far fewer than the thousands that the Inca had at their disposal. But what the Spanish did possess was armour, firearms, cannons and horses. Against an enemy that possessed clubs and spears – and which had already been weakened by civil war and smallpox – these were to prove decisive.

Within a few short years, the Spanish had utterly ravaged the once-great Inca empire, levelling towns and temples wherever they found them. And it was what happened as Pizarro and his men slowly but surely squeezed the life out of Inca resistance over the following decades that brought Hiram Bingham III back to Peru on another expedition in 1911.

The rediscovery of Machu Picchu

What drew Bingham to South America was the long-lost Inca citadel of Vilcabamba. It was from here, deep in Peru’s mountains, that the emperor Manco Inca had led an audacious guerrilla campaign against the Spanish. And it was here that the very last embers of Inca resistance were extinguished in 1572.

Bingham was determined to find this tragic city. The thrilling possibility that he had done just that must have raced around his head as he explored Machu Picchu for the first time in July 1911. But this wasn’t Vilcabamba; it was somewhere far more spectacular still.

Bingham would return to Machu Picchu on numerous occasions over the following years. He took hundreds of photographs, excavated scores of graves, and transported thousands of objects – among them pottery, tools and bronze knives – back to the United States (in doing so, he sparked a longrunning spat between Yale and the Peruvian government, which accused the university of profiting from Peru’s cultural heritage).

But it was what Bingham left behind him that led UNESCO, when appointing Machu Picchu a World Heritage Site in 1983, to declare it “an absolute masterpiece of architecture and a unique testimony to the Inca civilisation”.

What was life like in Machu Picchu?

Archaeologists believe that somewhere between 300 and 1,000 people lived up here in the city’s heyday. As subsequent excavations would reveal, the city was divided between an agricultural and an urban sector, the latter made up of major temples, housing and workshops, and an open central plaza where the population would have congregated to worship. And, as Bingham soon realised, these were no ordinary buildings – they were masterpieces of engineering, edifices of almost mind-boggling beauty and complexity.

They may have had nothing more than stone and bronze tools at their disposal, but Inca craftsmen were masters of their art, constructing the walls and buildings that sit atop Machu Picchu with almost surgical precision.

Of these, none is more impressive than the Temple of the Sun, a huge, semicircular place of worship aligned to catch the Sun’s rays on the winter solstice. It was constructed around what the Inca would have regarded as a sacred rock, which may have acted as an altar.

Worship of the Sun God was clearly important to the residents of Machu Picchu, and this is borne out by the presence of a famous ritual stone known as the ‘Inti Watana’. Archaeologists believe that the Inca performed a ritual here at winter solstice, in which they ceremonially tied the Sun to the post so that it couldn’t fall permanently below the horizon.

If the Temple of the Sun and the Inti Watana were the spiritual hubs of Machu Picchu, then a series of exquisite buildings containing a royal palace – known as the ‘king’s group’ – appear to be the secular centre. This was clearly the residence of someone very important, for not only is it the most elaborate of Machu Picchu’s buildings, it was also sited next to the city’s most impressive fountain, serving up water delivered by a 760-metre-long stonelined canal.

If that was an amazing hydraulic achievement, then the city’s famous terrace system was perhaps even more impressive. Twelve acres of fertile farming land provided maize, potatoes and even avocados for the population’s palates. And, by soaking up the 2,000 millimetres of rainfall that fell from the sky each year, the terraces would have served another critical purpose: stopping the city from sliding off the side of the mountain.

Why was Machu Picchu built?

To appreciate the true genius of Machu Picchu, you have to consider not just what it contains, but where it is: 2,430 metres above sea level; 450 metres above the river Urubamba, which races past the feet of the cliffs below.

This truly is a city in the clouds, and the fact that its inhabitants had to transport 20-tonne stones up the side of this mountain with perhaps nothing more sophisticated at their disposal than wooden sleds turns it from a spectacular engineering achievement into an astounding one.

But the question is, who was the driving force behind this awesome achievement, and why did he or she have it built? It was a question that Bingham took to the grave. Now, 60 years after the great adventurer breathed his last, we appear to have an answer.

• Read more | Did the Age of Exploration bring more harm than good?

The breakthrough came when University of California, Berkeley, anthropologist John Rowe discovered an Inca document that contained references to a royal retreat called ‘Picchu’. That document also made mention of a legal claim to ownership of ‘Picchu’, laid down by descendants of Emperor Pachacuti. The inference is clear: if the emperor’s successors were claiming Machu Picchu as their own, then it must have once been his. The theory that Pachacuti ordered the building of Machu Picchu (in around 1450) has proved persuasive.

As a fearsome warrior-leader who presided over the Inca empire at its very height, he certainly had the power to assemble the most talented people and the unlimited labour that would have been required to attempt such a massive undertaking.

What has also proved persuasive is the suggestion that Machu Picchu was a royal retreat where the emperor and his closest advisers would have repaired each winter when the climatic conditions in his capital city, Cusco (at an even more dizzying altitude of 3,400 metres), became too harsh. This elite party may have entered the city via a secret, grass rope-bridge over the river at its base before taking up residence at Machu Picchu’s impressive royal palace.

Left to ruin

Machu Picchu outlived its probable creator – who died in 1471 – but not by much. Pizarro’s men never discovered the site but, a decade after they deceived the unsuspecting Atuahalpa in 1532, its residents were gone.

Perhaps they felt isolated up there in their lofty home, perhaps they didn’t have enough supplies to sustain themselves. Either way, they left it to be swallowed up by the Peruvian forest, where it lay largely forgotten, until Bingham stumbled across it more than 350 years later.

• Read more | The Golden Age: The Spanish Empire of Charles V

Today, Machu Picchu is anything but forgotten – hundreds of thousands of tourists visit it every year. Like Pachacuti and Hiram Bingham III before them, these visitors have to make an arduous journey up the mountain. But, within seconds of casting their eyes on this wonder of the world, they surely know that their effort was worth it.

This content first appeared in the  January 2017 edition of BBC History Revealed

Let’s start with the title of your book, On Savage Shores. What can you tell us about the meaning?

People often use the term “savage” as a racial slur to diminish and belittle Indigenous peoples. I wanted to deliberately invert that stereotype. In my book, I follow Indigenous Americans who travelled to Europe after 1492 – from their perspective, Europe was a much more savage place than the Americas.

We tend to think of the “Columbian exchange” as a one-way cultural encounter – a story of Europeans going to the Americas. Why is it that we don’t hear much about Indigenous Americans coming to Europe?

That’s a good question. It’s not that historians have never written about this; I’m standing on the shoulders of other scholars in my work. But for some reason the presence of Indigenous peoples in Europe doesn’t seem to have made an impression on popular understanding of the past. I think that might be because, in our imagination, 15th and 16th-century Europe is a white, ruffed and codpieced “Golden Age”. The stories we’re told are about kings, lords and royal dramas. But how many people know that there was a Brazilian king at the court of Henry VIII, or that there were tens of thousands of enslaved Indigenous people in Spain?

• Read more | America: Brave new world or accident?

How many Indigenous Americans came to Europe, and when?

Exact numbers are difficult to pin down, because the official statistics we have are almost certainly far too low. We know that there were tens of thousands, at least, but the number may be very much larger. The vast majority came as enslaved people into Spain and Portugal, but there are also Indigenous people recorded in England, the Netherlands, the other Low Countries and Germany. And they appear from as early as Christopher Columbus’s first voyage, when he brought back Taíno people from the Caribbean. So, from the first moment of encounter, Indigenous travellers are part of the story.

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What sources do we have for this?

The problem is that a lot of the sources are from the perspective of Europeans – written either by people who kidnapped Indigenous Americans, or by diplomats or courtiers who happened to see them once they reached Europe. However, there are some sources that occasionally allow us to hear the voices of Indigenous people themselves.

After 1542, when it became illegal to enslave Indigenous people in Spain’s American colonies, amazing testimonies were produced by Indigenous peoples applying for their freedom. Today these are held in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville. They are formulaic legal records, but they provide fascinating pictures of the lives of people from all across Central and South America. They explain what happened to them, including information about their life stories or how they were kidnapped.

• Read more | What can the Aztecs tell us about themselves? The secrets of their ‘indigenous annals’

Then there’s the Cantares Mexicanos, a collection of 16th-century Nahuatl songs and poems by Indigenous people singing about their histories – which is how they would have recorded these stories in a popular oral tradition. They include stories of travel, too.

What did Indigenous Americans make of European societies that they encountered?

We’re obviously talking about a hugely diverse range of peoples, from the Inuit in the north of what is now Canada down to the Tupi people in Brazil. But some common threads emerge. One is that they were horrified by inequalities in European society, and didn’t understand how people with vast wealth could live right beside others in abject poverty. They were also surprised by leaders who were ineffective, or were children – the idea of boy kings was completely nonsensical to them.

My suspicion is that many Indigenous Americans saw European gender roles as peculiar. In many Native American cultures, women were incredibly effective and influential but, apart from Elizabeth I, they would have seen few influential women at European courts. Beating children was another thing they were surprised by. They had different ideas about childhood, and didn’t understand using violence against people you were supposed to care for.

Though part of the wider story of slavery, the enslavement of Indigenous American peoples is an aspect with which many in Europe might not be so familiar. What can you tell us about it?

There’s been an upsurge in scholarship on the enslavement of Indigenous peoples in the past few decades. In particular, Andrés Reséndez wrote a wonderful book, The Other Slavery, in which he estimates that around a million Indigenous people were enslaved before 1600 alone – a figure that may have risen as high as 4 to 5 million by 1900.

This idea of it as an “other slavery” is an allusion to the fact that this hasn’t been widely recognised by history. But it also refers to the fact that it was another kind of slavery. Very often, Indigenous people were involved in forms of forced labour that weren’t technically labelled slavery but were still effectively bondage.

• Read more | How slavery thrived in Renaissance Europe

In the first part of the 16th century, Indigenous American people were being literally traded across the Atlantic – maybe tens of thousands of them. Some estimates have been as high as hundreds of thousands, but I haven’t been able to verify a number quite that big. Europeans were kidnapping Indigenous peoples and using them for forced labour, both within the Americas and overseas. But the extent of this became much murkier after 1542, when it became illegal to enslave Indigenous people.

We know they were still being treated as slaves, just identified differently. In Spanish territories, for example, there was a system called the encomienda: as an Indigenous person, you were technically “entrusted” to a Spaniard who was supposed to look after and evangelise you; in exchange, you would work for the Spaniard. In most cases, though, that may as well have been slavery. Sources often talk about Indigenous people being “brought” or “taken” to Europe, and it’s important to look out for those words. Even in the cases of elite individuals who became diplomatic representatives for their people, often the issue of consent is murky and ambiguous.

You look at stories of Indigenous Americans who came to Europe with diplomatic aims. What kind of petitions were they bringing?

A number of high-status Indigenous people came to England, either to assist the English in their explorations or in some cases to meet with the monarch. An interesting case is the so-called “Brazilian king” who met Henry VIII on a diplomatic mission in 1531. In order to guarantee his safe return, the English left a hostage with that king’s people. However, the king died of disease in Europe before he could return home. The English were worried about the fate of the hostage, but the people in Brazil understood, and allowed the hostage to go free.

Other travellers included Manteo and Wanchese, high-status men from Croatan and Roanoke, on the north-eastern coast of what’s now the United States. Although they became entangled with English agendas, they seemed to be part of a mission to investigate Britain on behalf of their own people. The same is true of some of the Taíno people who crossed the Atlantic in the 1490s. It was originally assumed that they were simply brought by Columbus but, when you dig into the sources, it appears that some of them were related to rulers of Caribbean islands, so there may have been a diplomatic agenda.

There are well-recorded cases of high-status Indigenous people in the Spanish and Portuguese territories, often descendants of prominent nobility, coming over to Europe to appeal for their rights through the Spanish legal system. For example, the sons of [the Aztec emperor] Moctezuma are recorded appealing for money, pensions, jobs and confirmation of the rights to their lands.

• Read more | Two worlds collide: Spanish conquistadors and Aztecs

The Tlaxcalans, who allied with the Spanish to defeat the Mexica (who we think of as the Aztecs), were very successful within the Spanish legal system. The first time that Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortés returned to Spain from Mexico in 1528, he brought a big entourage with him. Historically, we’ve tended to focus on the entertainers, jugglers and tumblers in that group, but it also included several ambassadors – noblemen who were there to promote their interests.

During that expedition, the Tlaxcalans gained the right for their city to be recognised as an independent state under the Spanish crown, meaning that they would never be subject to any command or local authority. They got a coat of arms and exemptions from taxation.

Though the Tlaxcalans were especially successful, expeditions in which noble families came to Spain to promote their interests or complain about Spanish actions were fairly typical. The conquest of the Americas was not a straightforward story of Europeans versus Indigenous peoples. Very often, Indigenous nobilities were forced to either cooperate with or exploit European ways of doing things.

• Read more | Why we should remember when Cortés’s conquistadors were forced to flee the Aztec capital

You also recount several cases of Indigenous people starting families with Europeans, willingly or unwillingly. Could you give some examples?

We know that in the Americas, Indigenous women frequently had relationships with European men. Those were often informal, and Europeans weren’t always keen to bring Indigenous wives with them when they returned home. One of the most famous examples is Matoaka, known to many as Pocahontas, who came to Europe as the wife of an Englishman and was used to promote English colonisation in the Americas as a civilising force.

But such examples are more ubiquitous in mainland Europe. Occasionally, the records show Spaniards bringing home Indigenous wives or partners, but we know that a lot of the time it was unrecorded. The trouble is that the Spanish licences to travel across the Atlantic used a word that meant “dependent”; they didn’t have to define exactly who that was, so it could mean a servant or a partner.

The precarity of many of these people is very evident. For instance, one Indigenous Peruvian woman, Isabel, was brought to Castile by a Spanish man, Pedro de Oropesa, whom she recognised as her legitimate partner, but he decided to marry a European woman instead. When he died, the new wife tried to assert that the Indigenous woman was enslaved all along, so they had to fight it out in the courts and Isabel was only declared free many years later in 1570.

Mestizo children [of mixed ancestry] were also often brought to Europe by their fathers. The most famous example is probably Martín, the son of Cortés. The pope legitimised this son, and Martín actually gained a much higher status than his father. Unlike the elder Cortés, who was not deemed of good enough birth, Martín was recognised as a member of the Order of Santiago, because his mother was a high status Indigenous woman [the translator Malintzin, also called La Malinche or Doña Marina] who had been important in the conquest; by then, too, his father had become a marquis.

• On the podcast | 15 minutes of fame: Malintzin, Aztec interpreter

You also find much more ordinary stories. In 1539, a woman called Beatriz, from somewhere in Venezuela, came across the Atlantic with a man called Alonso Ponce and their young mestizo daughter, Juana. We know that Beatriz was enslaved because she had been branded on her face. Alonso Ponce was the third person to enslave her, but as far as we know she was recognised as his partner.

If she’d lived just one more year after her transatlantic voyage, she’d have been able to apply for her freedom. As it was, she died and was buried in Spain. Ponce then cared for his daughter with the help of his sister, before sending Juana off to become a maid in a Seville household. This is what would have been expected with a non-mestizo daughter and Juana seems to have become part of the community.

Are there any individual stories from your book that have really stuck with you?

In 1577, the English explorer Martin Frobisher returned from a trip to north-eastern Canada with three Indigenous Inuit people he had captured: a man, a woman and a baby. The Europeans thought that they were a family, but it seems that actually the woman and man didn’t know each other. They arrived in Bristol in October and became a real spectacle. Artists flocked to paint them; memorable images drawn of them by John White show the infant, Nutaaq, peeking out of his mother, Arnaq’s, hood.

Local records talk about how the man, Kalicho, hunted ducks with a “dart” on the river Avon to demonstrate how he would harpoon seals. That’s a funny image, but it’s also an incredibly tragic story. It seems that Kalicho had been injured when he was captured. He quickly became ill, and died less than a month after he arrived. The doctor who carried out the autopsy made Arnaq watch the burial and see Kalicho’s dismembered corpse, to demonstrate that the English were not cannibals, which seems frankly horrific.

Arnaq was very quiet, which the doctor took to mean that she wasn’t bothered, but it seems much more likely that she was incredibly traumatised. Arnaq herself then became ill – probably with measles – which happened frequently to Indigenous people who had no natural resistance to European diseases. She died a few days after Kalicho. The baby, Nutaaq, was then taken to London. His mother had died and he must have been terrified. Strangers took him to an inn called the Three Swans, where they put him on display and charged people to view him.

But, like his mother, he probably had measles, and died just eight days later. Nutaaq is buried at the tiny church of St Olave’s on the corner of Hart Street and Seething Lane in the City of London. Buried in the same graveyard is Samuel Pepys, about whose life no detail goes unreported. The English writer was laid to rest in the same place as this tiny baby about whom we know almost nothing and whose voice we can barely hear, which is such a striking juxtaposition for me.

It’s a moving and tragic story – but also, sadly, typical. So many Indigenous people were taken from their homes and died in a strange land, surrounded by strangers and buried in ways that did not respect their traditions or beliefs. They were separated forever from their homelands – which for many Indigenous peoples is a rupture, a wound.

Can the legacy of this story still be felt in Europe today?

It’s possible to create a jolly cosmopolitan history of globalisation in this period. I could say, for example, that the legacy is that our language is absolutely full of Indigenous words like canoe and hammock. Or I could say that foods from the Americas are central to our lives today. Imagine Italian cooking without tomatoes or peppers. Imagine Asian cuisine without chillies. The first people to drink chocolate in Europe were Maya lords.

The legacy of what’s often called the “Columbian exchange” is vast, and Indigenous peoples were very much part of that. So you could look to this era for the roots of our global world today.

But it’s also important to reflect on the colonial violence in this story that has an enduring legacy – to recognise the depth of that legacy, and the ways in which Indigenous peoples are seeking to overcome it. These peoples are now starting to try to reclaim the bodies and the belongings of their ancestors from European institutes, to recover their heritage and to repair these wounds where they can. But there’s a lot more work to do.

Caroline Dodds Pennock is the author of On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2023). Buy it now on Amazon, Waterstones or Bookshop.org

This article was first published in the February 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine

Who was Babur?

Babur, a descendant of two great conquerors Genghis Khan and Timur (also known as Tamerlane), was the founder of the Mughal empire in the 16th century, which would control large swathes of South Asia until the 19th century. “He was, and I think remains, a very interesting person indeed,” says Professor Margaret MacMillan. “And what’s so interesting about him, amongst other things, is that he kept a diary.”

Babur’s life

Born in 1483, Babur became the ruler of the small principality of Fergana (modern-day Uzbekistan) at just 12 years old, after his father died when his weight caused the dovecote that he was standing in to collapse and tumble into a ravine below his palace. Babur’s inheritance was not accepted willingly by his uncles, who relentlessly sought to take the position from him, and “he spent a great deal of his early life fighting.”

These details are known from the “extraordinary” record of his life that Babur kept, Babur-nameh. Such a record is rare, as rulers were not often literate. “I cannot think of another powerful ruler, emperor, or monarch before the last couple of centuries who wrote a diary,” explains MacMillan.

For the first decade of his rule, Babur was in near-constant conflict to seize lands in Asia, particularly the city of Samarkand. He failed many times, and ended up losing Fergana too, so that he considered giving up and residing in China. Instead, he headed south into present-day Afghanistan.

In 1504, he captured the strategically important city of Kabul, before eventually taking Kandahar too. Now in control of a substantial kingdom, Babur looked to the east to expand. In the 1520s, he launched his conquest of north India and, with his modernised and trained armies, was able to achieve significant victories and make consecutive gains.

“By the grace of the Almighty God, this difficult task was made easy to me and that mighty army, in the space of a half a day was laid in dust,” he wrote in his diary after one battle in 1526.

• Read more | 10 historical turning points for modern India

Despite being surrounded by hostile regions, regular Afghan attacks on Kabul for him to contend with, and the threat of rebellion among his own followers, Babur came to secure his lands and control much of north and central India. His Mughal empire was the largest until the arrival of the British; a multi-ethnic, multi-religious dominion.

Whilst MacMillan wishes to avoid the idealisation of Babur, she explains that he was also “a very great fighter”. He not only had a capacity for combat, but for keeping people by his side due to his skills as a diplomat. He could learn from his mistakes and – allowing for the fact that his own memoirs are the primary source for this – he seems to have encouraged people to critique him.

However, MacMillan notes that Babur could be “pretty ruthless”. He was a man who knew what he wanted; he would make alliances, then abandon them when they no longer proved useful.

• Read more of our 15 minutes of fame series 

Someone who did not experience this ruthlessness was Babur’s son, Humayun. He became emperor following his father’s death, in 1530, and there are records of the “rather touching letters” Babur sent him. Within these, he provided advice and requested that he keep in touch. “You get a sense that he’s a bit worried Humayun is not up to the job,” MacMillan explains. “I think he did worry, as people in powerful positions often do, about his legacy.”

Regarding Babur’s legacy, Macmillan says, “He’s not as well-known as he should be.” She believes this could be because his memoirs were not, for a long time, translated into English, but since a newer translation there has been more interest in him. “I think more is being written about the Mughal empire, so perhaps Babur should be better known.”

Why does Babur deserve his 15 minutes of fame?

“He deserves his 15 minutes of fame partly because he made a difference in history,” says MacMillan. “He created the Mughal empire and has left his mark on India.

“But I think we should remember him,” she adds, “because he is one of those voices who does provide a connection with the past.”

Margaret MacMillan is emeritus professor of history at the University of Toronto and of international history at the University of Oxford, specialising in British imperial history and the international history of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her latest book is War: how conflict shaped us (Random House, 2020)

To mark HistoryExtra’s 1500th episode, Jerry Brotton takes Ellie Cawthorne on a whistle-stop tour around the world in AD 1500, from the powerful dynasties of Eurasia and the rich culture of Ming dynasty China to the melting pot of Constantinople. They discuss the shifting balance of power in Africa at the start of the 16th century, explore the origins of European slavery and colonialism, and reveal how the Americas stood on the precipice of a great transformation.

Who was Malintzin?

Malintzin, also known as Doña Marina or La Malinche, was an Indigenous Nahua woman who lived in Mexico during the 16th century. She became the translator for Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés, who invaded Mexico in 1519, once she was given to him as a slave.

“She is someone who has become known in mythology and popular mythology,” explains Dr Caroline Dodds Pennock, “but I don’t think we know very much about her as a woman”.

Malintzin’s life

The information we have on Malintzin comes after she was enslaved by Hernando Cortés. She was a Nahuatl-speaking woman, possibly of noble descent, who was sold into slavery in a Maya community. Pennock explains that it’s difficult to tell the details of this exchange but, at the age of perhaps no more than 16, she was enslaved by Cortés along with a group of women.

Malintzin was then enslaved to a man in Cortés’s company, Alonso Hernández Puertocarrero. However, as Cortés’s expedition progressed, he realised how useful Malintzin could be to him. She was capable of conversing in both Nahuatl and Maya with Indigenous peoples, and her talents as a linguist led to a position as Cortés’s translator.

Pennock says that Malintzin’s role as a translator was “absolutely vital” in the conquest of the Aztec empire as, although Cortés did use brutal force at times, he also built alliances with Indigenous peoples. The most famous of these alliances was with the Tlaxcalans, who became his principal allies; they formed tens of thousands in his company when he beseiged Tenochtitlan and defeated the Aztec capital city.

It is difficult to analyse Malintzin’s part in the conquest because we don’t hear much about her as an individual. Indigenous people began calling Cortés a version of Malintzin’s name, and she appears either in front or beside him in pictographic texts. The two became almost as “one person” in the Indigenous mind and, if anything, Pennock adds, they viewed Malintzin as more important than Cortés. The problem with this, however, is the slight scapegoating of Malintzin in Spanish and Mexican histories over some of the events that occurred.

Pennock notes the complex nature of Malintzin’s resultant legacy. She had a son with Cortés, and often appears in conflicting narratives. For instance, her alternate name ‘Malinchista’ is given to betrayers in Mexico, but she has also been claimed as an emblem of Indigenous femininity by the Chicana women’s movement.

“She hasn’t got one single history,” Pennock says, on the difficulty of disentangling Malintzin as a human from the various accounts she exists within. “We often see her inside the stories, but her own agency is quite hidden”. Pennock argues that Malintzin can be seen as a woman who made the best of her situation, and elevated herself from enslavement to being an influential figure.

Why does Malintzin deserve her 15 minutes of fame?

Malintzin deserves her 15 minutes of fame, Pennock explains, because she stands as an emblem for all the intermediaries and the, usually Indigenous, people who are part of this exchange but who often get lost and forgotten.

It is also Malintzin as a woman that Pennock argues for remembrance of: “she’s often seen more as an emblem, as a figure for various movements or ideas than she is a person. She is viewed as someone who plays a critical role in a famous moment of history, but herself gets lost.”

Dr Caroline Dodds Pennock is a lecturer in international history at the University of Sheffield. Her upcoming book On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe will be released in January 2023 and is available to pre-order now

Jon Bauckham spoke to Dr Caroline Dodds Pennock. Listen to the full interview and find more episodes in our 15 minutes of fame podcast series

If there is a commodity every politician would love to be able to bottle, it must surely be the “feel-good factor”, that sense of wellbeing that Voltaire lampooned so effectively in Candide with the philosophy of Dr Pangloss: “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds”. Ironically, it is our confrontational political system that helps to ensure that, like the end of the rainbow, that blessed state of universal satisfaction remains elusive.

Any party in opposition devotes itself to playing on the discontents of sections of the population in order to rubbish the claimed achievements of the party in power. They know that they can rely for emotional backing and votes on the much more substantial “feel-bad factor”. Thus, for example, education and the NHS will remain contentious subjects as long as there are people with unhappy experiences of hospitals and schools. It was President Hoover who observed pessimistically, but I believe correctly, that consumer-led capitalist democracy produces “constantly moving happiness machines” controlled by their autocratic desires and expectations.

• 9 of the worst monarchs in history

Such reflections led me to ponder the question, “What times were there in British history that were really bad?” Can we identify any “no hope” years? It soon became obvious that I had to remove several possible candidates that might immediately thrust themselves into the spotlight. For example, years in which there were national disasters, such as bad harvests, or civil war did not necessarily meet the criteria. They did not affect all sections of the population (one man’s famine is another man’s increased profit) and calamities, such as the Blitz, often brought out the best in national character.

Distant and not disastrous

I also had to be wary of events that historians have dubbed “important”. The arrival of William of Orange to expel James II in 1688 was the last successful invasion of our shores and was pregnant with political consequences but how was it perceived by the majority of contemporaries? Did they really care very much who wore the crown in distant Westminster?

• Read more | How glorious was the Glorious Revolution

That for me was the crucial point: what years saw such a concatenation of disastrous events that most people were driven to despair? Having, very subjectively, of course, compiled a shortlist of five anni horribile (I use the term “year” loosely because events and movements do not fit conveniently into calendar units), just for fun I decided to select a “winner”. My “judge’s choice” will probably surprise many readers and irritate a few but I hope it will provoke all into reflecting further on what it was like to live through crisis years.

The human race, and our particular chunk of it, is remarkably resilient, and focusing attention on times that have seen us at our lowest ebb also highlights our ability to overcome catastrophe and pluck hope from the jaws of despair.

When Nero became emperor in AD 54, he seriously considered withdrawing his legions from Britain. The Roman conquest of the island had been underway for a decade and had been very heavy going. The tribes, sometimes acting in concert, had inflicted some humiliating defeats on Roman forces and were continuing to harass the invaders. An official divide-and-rule policy was not proving strikingly successful. Nero decided to strengthen the Roman invasion forcefully, because, according to the historian Tacitus, he did not want to be outdone by his predecessor, Claudius. His decision had a shattering effect on the people of Britain.

• Read more | Everything you wanted to know about Roman Britain – but were afraid to ask

Suetonius Paulinus, who was sent to lead the advance, was a no-nonsense soldier with a reputation for fighting in mountainous terrain. This was important because north Wales had been identified as the main centre of British resistance. Anglesey was the site of the principal druidic shrine, a haven for fugitives and a source of anti-Roman propaganda. The druids were drawn from the upper echelons of tribal society. They were scholars, priests, poets and judges, who preserved and passed on ancient laws and legends.

The concept of nationalism is anachronistic in first-century Britain but the druids seem to have been a unifying force, providing a powerful ideological basis for resisting the alien Roman culture. The druids had been a respected element of society for generations. For the AD 60 Britons, it must have seemed that the druids had always been there. To strike at them, Suetonius knew, would be to demoralise the whole population.

Tacitus has left a vivid description of the confrontation of cultures:

The enemy was arrayed along the shore in a massive, dense and heavily-armed line of battle, … Women, dressed in black like the Furies, were thrusting their way about in it, their hair let down and streaming, and they were brandishing flaming torches. Around the enemy host were druids uttering prayers and curses, flinging their arms towards the sky. The Roman troops stopped short in their tracks as if their limbs were paralysed… by this extraordinary and novel sight. However, in the end, exhortations from their commander and an exchange among themselves of encouragement not to be scared of a womanish and fanatic army broke the spell. They overran those who resisted them and cast them into their own flames. Subsequently a garrison was imposed on the defeated enemy and the groves sacred to savage superstitions destroyed.

While Suetonius’s men were harrying enemies in the West, a bigger rebellion broke out on the other side of the country. The underlying reason for the revolt led by the Iceni and Trinovantes of East Anglia was the insensitivity of the new regime.

Claudius’s officials had created client kingdoms, seeking to co-operate with tribal rulers, and Suetonius treated the Britons with contempt born of fear. He and his men were trying to hold down a large hostile population from a few fortified settlements with the support of client chieftains on whom they could not completely rely. Suetonius’s response was to enforce his authority ruthlessly.

• Read more | The Roman invasion: whose side were the Britons on?

Boudica rebels

Pushed too far, several of the tribes rebelled. Under the leadership of Queen Boudica of the Iceni, they overran Camulodunum (Colchester), Londinium and Verulamium (St Albans). They cut to pieces a sizeable contingent of the Ninth Legion and moved west, a disorderly host exhilarated by success, and gorged on booty.

• Read more | Alternate history: what if Boudica had defeated the Romans?

Suetonius concentrated his hastily-gathered force of some 10,000 legionaries in a tactical position, perhaps somewhere near Nuneaton. They were horrendously outnumbered, probably by more than ten to one. The battle, when it came, was hard fought and lasted for hours. It was brute force against discipline and superior weapons. Eventually, British ranks buckled. No accurate casualty figures are possible but Tacitus’s estimate of 80,000 Britons killed in the fighting is probably not too great an exaggeration.

Survivors may have wished that they had fallen in battle for Suetonius’s reprisals over the ensuing months spread death and destruction through the land.

AD 60 qualifies for my list because it left a people, not just humiliated, cowed and conquered, but deprived of their own laws, their myths and legends.

Any short list of disastrous times must feature the Black Death of 1348–50. The plague, which assumed bubonic and pneumonic forms, landed in Bristol from the continent in the summer of 1348 and spread rapidly along trade routes, reaching London in autumn. The natural reaction of people in smitten areas was to flee, which hastened the spread of infection. Ironically, the Scots unwittingly rushed to embrace it. Armies crossed the border to take advantage of England’s weakened state and the soldiers carried the disease back with them.

• Read more | Were medieval people cleaner than we think?

By the end of 1349 the plague had reached all mainland regions and had crossed to Ireland. When the pandemic was over in mid-1350, it had carried off more than 30 per cent of the population of these islands. Contemporary records bear pitiful testimony to widespread shock and distress. The suffering of the afflicted, the grief of survivors and the sight and stench of unburied bodies beggars imagination.

The shattering of national morale was all the worse because the Black Death came at a time when England was riding high in Europe. Under the leadership of the belligerent, youthful Edward III, impressive victories had been won over the French and the Scots. After the battle of Crécy (1346) and the capture of Calais (1347) troops arrived home laden with booty and it was said that no woman in the country lacked for some graceful gown or valuable trinket. Edward actually celebrated while the plague was at its heights, by forming the Order of the Garter.

• Read more | Edward III: the family man

It is almost inconceivable that the lords and ladies who celebrated at lavish banquets and tournaments could be unaware that all around them the social fabric was falling apart. They seem to have been as indifferent to the suffering of the people as most of us are to the impact of HIV/Aids in Africa, even though, as the Italian writer Boccaccio observed, “many valiant men and fair ladies breakfasted with their kinsfolk and supped with their ancestors”.

In an age when all manner of diseases were rife and life expectancy among the lower orders was in the mid-thirties, perhaps the piecemeal reports reaching the royal court did not seem to be all that catastrophic. King and Parliament thought they could legislate their way out of the crisis.

Faced with a mobile labour force of peasants leaving their manors and demanding high wages from employers desperate to have their flocks tended, the government enacted the Statute of Labourers in 1351 ordering people to return to their masters on pain of imprisonment. But the effects of the Black Death went further than the undermining of feudalism and the emergence of a wage economy. People in distress looked immediately to those whose job it was to help them – the parish clergy and the members of religious orders. Many men and women of God went about their work heroically among the sick and dying, but there were many more who fled the pestilence and left their flocks to die without the benefit of masses.

English heresy

Ironically, the dearth of clergy after 1349 led to many unsuitable men being hastily ordained, with a concomitant fall in moral and educational standards. Small wonder that anticlericalism became a feature of national life and, before the end of the century, fed into the “English heresy”, Lollardy. Even if people were not lured into false belief, they tended to embrace a morbid scepticism. The Dance of Death became an increasingly familiar painted image.

• Read more | Kill or cure? 10 medieval medical practices and their effectiveness

The Black Death challenged the traditional certainties on which society rested. People inevitably asked why it happened. Was it a divine punishment? Did it presage the end of the world? Was it all the fault of the Jews? Britain managed to avoid the worst excesses of persecution and wild apocalyptic preaching that hit the continent nor was there the kind of religious revival which often followed major disaster. On the contrary, looting, prostitution and profiteering became commonplace in Britain and went, largely, unpunished. It was not just human bodies that were destroyed by the plague.

In October William Tyndale, the Protestant reformer, was burned at the stake with these words on his lips, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes”, and the people of Lincolnshire rose in revolt claiming to deliver the same king from his Protestant councillors. This was the year the Reformation storm, building up for a decade, finally burst.

Angry that the Pope, a foreign potentate, could determine the fate of the Tudor dynasty by refusing permission for him to divorce and marry again to sire a male heir, Henry VIII had been happy to give some encouragement to the small, but growing and influential Protestant minority. He had used Parliament to cow the clergy, break with Rome and have himself proclaimed head of the Church in England.

None of these events impacted greatly on ordinary parishioners. Traditional practices and beliefs throughout the land remained unchanged and conventional Catholics were, doubtless, reassured by the seeking out of Protestant “troublemakers” (Foxe’s Book of Martyrs lists 180 men and women who burned or were forced to recant between 1527 and 1535). In 1536 everything changed.

• Read more | Henry VIII’s savage Reformation

With Henry the personal and the political were always intertwined. In January he had a serious tiltyard accident and for several hours his recovery was despaired of. The shock had psychological repercussions. Always belligerent and determined, the King now became vicious and intractable to the point of paranoia. Made forcefully aware of his mortality, he untangled himself from his marriage to Anne Boleyn, who had failed to provide him with a male heir. The Queen and her alleged “paramours” were executed in May. This reassured those of the political elite who hated Anne for her Protestant sympathies but, as Thomas More had warned, Henry was like an unpredictable lion whose claws could lash out against anyone.

Read more | Tracy Borman reveals Henry VIII’s final ‘kindness’ to Anne Boleyn

Anger and suspicion

He now showed that “head of the Church” was no empty title. In March an Act was passed dissolving all religious houses with an annual income of less than £200. As well as the distress caused to the small communities of monks and nuns, anger and suspicion were aroused among their neighbours, who suspected that this was the thin end of a land-grabbing wedge. Their suspicions deepened when commissioners were sent out to assess the wealth and spiritual condition of the remaining monasteries. Then, in July, Parliament passed into law what were ironically called Articles of Faith to Establish Christian Quietness. Among its clauses was one condemning superstitious and idolatrous practices. When Henry was warned that these measures would stir unrest, he responded by forbidding all preaching for three months, which closed the lid on boiling discontent.

• Read more | Henry VIII: confident young king or insecure son?

Feelings ran particularly high in the North and the East Midlands. The last straw was the arrival of the King’s tax gatherers in September. Rumours spread that the officials had come to remove church treasures. In Lincolnshire angry mobs, egged on by priests, raised the standard of revolt and took the King’s men prisoner. The Lincolnshire rebellion was nipped in the bud by a show of force, but trouble had spread across the Humber and most of the North was up in arms. York, Hull and Pontefract were soon in rebel hands and 30,000 “pilgrims” were encamped.

It was all over by March 1537 but that should not lead us to conclude that this revolt, the Pilgrimage of Grace, was anything less than a serious inflammation of the body politic. The rebellion embraced nobles, priests, merchants and peasants and they had sympathisers at court. The army Henry sent against the rebels was outnumbered and the dissidents only dispersed on receiving Henry’s promises of pardon and redress of grievances (which he had no intention of keeping). Henry was apoplectic with rage at the traitors. When the Duke of Norfolk reported that 74 rebels had been hanged he demanded to know why there were not more.

The year 1536 revealed to the people that they were governed by a tyrant. It began a period when ancient customs were banned, churches despoiled, clergy and laity imprisoned and executed. But regimenting faith was beyond even Henry. The seeds of change he sowed could only produce fruits of division, bitterness, anger and confusion.

Jane Austen was putting the finishing touches to Pride and Prejudice in 1812. Surely the year which saw the Bennets, Bingleys and Wickhams engrossed in their own jealous rivalries and petty snobberies could not qualify as an annus horribilis?

What we may easily forget is that Miss Austen’s romances are escapist literature and not social commentary. If they project a secure, structured, well-ordered society it is because their first readers needed the reassurance that such fiction conveyed. To take the most obvious example, we can read Jane Austen’s entire oeuvre and find just fleeting references to the French wars, which Britain had been engaged for almost two decades.

• Read more | Romance and reality in Jane Austen’s world

But that was not the worst calamity strike Britain in this doleful year. The Midlands and much of the North were revolt. “Sheer insurrectionary fury has rarely been more widespread in English history,” wrote EP Thompson The Making of the English Working Class. The troublemakers called themselves Luddites, were organised in mobs and broke into textile mills to smash newly-installed machines. Commercial dislocation caused by the war had forced manufacturers to economise by laying off workers, cutting wages and installing machines that did the work of several artisans.

Mill owners and their exploitation were the targets of angry, poverty-stricken demonstrators but the underlying causes of conflict were high prices and taxes (bad harvests drove the cost of a loaf of bread to its highest ever level) and also disturbing egalitarian ideas infiltrating from revolutionary France. The voting class demanded tough action.

Yorkshire mill owner William Horsfall spoke for many when he declared himself willing to wade through Luddite blood to restore order. In the event it was his own blood that flowed when he was gunned down by an anonymous assassin. The Government panicked and brought in capital punishment for machine-breaking, but there was no end to the social upheaval.

• Read more | Where history happened: Luddites

The political centre was in disarray. In the previous year George III had finally succumbed to illness and his indolent and unpopular son was vested permanently with full regency powers in February 1812. “Prinny” was lampooned by caricaturists, received sackfuls of abusive mail, and graffiti chalked on walls offered 100 guineas for his head. While the country faced war abroad and revolution at home the head of state devoted his energies to supervising plans for Regent’s Park and throwing lavish parties in Brighton. He was quite incapable of stamping his authority on a government riven by conflicts of personality and policy.

Spencer Perceval had been prime minister since the end of 1809 but was frequently at odds with his own colleagues. On 11 May, he was shot dead in the lobby of the House of Commons. Many right-thinking people were horrified by this atrocity – but many more were not. When the assassin, John Bellingham, was brought to execution cheering crowds surrounded the scaffold and 5,000 troops had to be mobilised to prevent the incident sparking an insurrection.

Widespread hostility

Meanwhile, the war pursued its laborious and costly way. In Spain, Wellington was gradually wearing down the French defenders but final victory was still not in sight. Autumn saw Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign, the prelude to his eventual downfall, but the scale of the French disaster was scarcely known in London by the end of the year.

By this time Britain’s military authorities had something else to worry about. On 19 June, the United States of America declared war on Britain. Not only was the nation now facing hostilities on two fronts, British possessions in Canada (where many families had relatives) were threatened. Worse still for morale was the fact that Britannia, which claimed to “rule the waves”, suffered some humiliating naval reverses.

Britain in 1812 was a divided nation. Economic disruption was severe. The cutlers of Sheffield were working at half capacity. In Birmingham, 9,000 factory workers were laid off. There was anarchy at home and debilitating war abroad. The Government was bereft of leadership and the country was at an all-time low. We know that things did improve – war gave way after 1815 to prolonged peace; the Industrial Revolution rocketed Britain into world economic leadership, and programmes of reform began. But Jane Austen’s troubled contemporaries were not equipped with crystal balls.

• Read more | The capture of the Chesapeake: how the British Royal Navy rescued its reputation in the War of 1812

What was so cruel about this year was that, after a brief period of optimism for national and international affairs, hopes were dashed and people found themselves face-to-face with both economic collapse and war. Events that cumulatively undermined morale were intertwined and we can best understand the deepening mood of gloom by following them chronologically, starting shortly before the opening of our year, in October 1936.

The main event making the headlines in this month was the Jarrow Crusade. Around 200 men from this shipbuilding town, where 68 per cent of the workforce was unemployed, marched by stages to Downing Street to demand jobs. They were greeted by cheering crowds everywhere and drew sympathetic support from all classes.

Unemployment, the worst manifestation of the Great Depression, had actually been falling since 1932 but the national average still stood at 18 per cent with figures much higher in the industrial North and Midlands. Successive governments had attempted various solutions but recovery was painfully slow and, within a year, jobless numbers would increase again.

All activists had their own “solutions” for Britain’s economic ills and another march held in this same month led to riots in London’s East End. Sir Oswald Mosley and his black-shirted British Union of Fascists paraded provocatively through the Jewish quarter.

• Read more | Who were the young people drawn to Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists?

The main events of November and December were symbolic, rather than illustrative of Britain’s decline. On 30 November, the magnificent Crystal Palace, built to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, was burned to the ground. The disaster seemed to many to close the curtain on Britain’s economic world domination.

A bigger shock occurred 11 days later. Edward VIII broadcast to the nation his decision to resign the Crown. The abdication crisis had been fought out in the press for several days – the Mail, Express and Mirror versus The Times and Telegraph. Readers debated who was behaving more disreputably, the King or the press barons.

Fear of extremism

So 1937 opened bleakly, and things didn’t get better. Domestic issues played more insistently with people than foreign affairs but no one could be unaware of the ominous changes disturbing the international scene. Ideologues pointed to the demons of communism or fascism as the reason for political and economic decline. The two systems were locked in armed conflict in Spain and 2,000 British left-wingers went off to fight in the civil war. Even the uncommitted majority were alarmed by news in April that German planes supporting General Franco had bombed the Basque fishing village of Guernica and its civilian population. The mounting belligerence of Germany and Italy (which had formed their Axis alliance in October) was pushing people towards thinking the unthinkable.

• Read more | Francisco Franco: is it accurate to call the Spanish dictator a fascist?

The “unthinkable” was that the Great War, which most Britons could still remember, might not be the “war to end wars”. Hopes of perpetual peace had been pinned on containment of Germany, general disarmament and the League of Nations. All three had proved broken reeds. A resurgent Germany refused to be constrained by the Treaty of Versailles (and many Britons supported it in the fight against the “greater menace” of communism).

The British government had been forced to divert funds from economic recovery to rearmament. The Ark Royal was launched in April. Spitfires and bombers were rolling off the production lines as, more ominously, were gas masks. The League had shown itself to be toothless when faced by nations that flouted its rules. By 1937 Germany had walked out, Japan declared its intention to do so and Italy resigned before the end of the year.

Disillusionment with politicians of all stripes was indicated in the general election of May when voting numbers reached their lowest level since 1923. Ramsay Macdonald and Stanley Baldwin who had, at least, been parliamentary figures of stature, both departed the scene.

Leadership fell into the hands of mediocrities unable to raise the nation’s morale. The Government made no objection when Ireland (under the name of Eire) severed its last connection with the United Kingdom.

The weary acceptance of inevitabilities numbed public consciousness and when, in August, news arrived of a second Wall Street crash there was a widespread feeling of “here we go again”.

To most Britons it seemed that the ship of state was adrift without a rudder in seas that were becoming increasingly turbulent.

Derek Wilson is the author of Sir Francis Walsingham: Courtier in an Age of Terror (Constable, 2007)

This article was first published in the February 2008 edition of BBC History Magazine

Experiments with tinted eyewear stretch back for centuries, including lenses made of smoky quartz in 12th-century China and Georgian spectacles designed to correct vision impairment. Silent film stars are also said to have used them to shield their eyes from the harsh, powerful studio lighting.

• Read more | Fashions of the Second World War

But the man credited with taking sunglasses from specialist equipment to affordable fashion accessory is founder of the Foster Grant eyewear company, Sam Foster. He began selling his mass-produced shades by the beaches of Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1929, where they caught on thanks to the practical benefits and the allure of ‘Hollywood glamour’.

Drawing on new technologies pioneered for US pilots, Ray-Ban made their distinctive ‘aviator’ sunglasses eight years later.

By 1938, sunglasses were fashionable enough to be described as a “new fad for wear on city streets” by Life magazine.

This article was taken from BBC History Revealed

With the rise of print in the 17th century, publishers were quick to tap into the universal enthusiasm for dancing, producing manuals of instructions for steps alongside popular tunes. By the turn of the 1700s, books like The Dancing-Master and The Art of Dancing Explained by Reading and Figures became more sophisticated.

Alongside the helpful diagrams, a pioneering French dance notation system indicated particular leg movements, arm flourishes and placement of the feet. Readers picked up single-dance booklets, or longer manuals featuring illustrations of bodily positions, as well as hints for maintaining decorum and general management of the limbs.

Bridgerton: everything you need to know

Step into the ballrooms of Regency England, and catch up on the real history that underpins seasons 1 and 2 of Bridgerton, from the real royals to the palaces and promenades | Read more

Many were written by dancing masters or mistresses, who set up academies around the country to offer coaching in technique. The best way to master the steps was repetition. Lady Caroline Lamb recalled inviting people to her house where steps were “being daily practiced… a number of foreigners coming here to learn”.

They danced all day, and went to a ball in the evening. In this way, new and radical dances spread quickly around Europe so that, during the Regency era, traditional cotillions (social dances), began to look stale compared to the “riotous and indecent German dance” – the waltz.

This article was taken from BBC History Revealed magazine

Listen to this article:

Once every six weeks during the winter of 1644, a young man from Manningtree in Essex woke up in terror in the night. It was always on a Friday, and his terror quickly turned to irritation. Somewhere outside, he could hear people talking. He began to listen carefully, and one night he heard a female voice speaking about her familiar spirits – devils in animal form.

Clearly a “horrible sect of witches” was active in Manningtree. This must be, the young man thought, “their meeting”, and they must be holding “solemn sacrifices there offered to the devil”.

The man listened as the Friday night reveller told her pet spirits that they must go to the house of Bess Clarke, who lived close by. She was already suspected of witchcraft by several townspeople as well as by the wakeful young man. And in March 1644 she was arrested by the local magistrate after these accusers reported her to him as a witch.

It was decided that the best way to obtain a confession from Clarke was to “keep her from sleep two or three nights” by walking her up and down, and employ a team of people to watch her. On the fourth night, when the young man dropped by the holding cell, Clarke was worn out. She had become suggestible, desperate to get some rest.

She told the young man that if only they could all sit down she would call her spirits. She had “had carnal copulation with the devil”, she announced, and she proceeded to tell her watchers that her demonic spirits were entering the room: a kitten, a spaniel, a greyhound, a rabbit and a polecat.

Listen | John Callow discusses the tragic case of the Bideford witches, the last women in England to be executed for the crime of witchcraft, in an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast:

Later, the young man, Matthew Hopkins, would write about that strange night and explain how cleverly he had induced Clarke to reveal her crimes (for which she was tried at Chelmsford assizes, and hanged).

With this success behind him, Hopkins began a two-year career as a witchfinder that saw more than 200 people hanged across seven English counties. By the end of this tour of terror, he would be known as the “Witchfinder General”.

The word “witchfinder” sounds like a formal job title, particularly when it’s capitalised – as it often is in stories of Matthew Hopkins. But although he did bear that memorable nickname, it was just that: a nickname, a handle.

Amateur sleuths

Hopkins was a self-appointed witchfinder – an amateur sleuth rather than a professional law enforcer, churchman or a military appointee. He was a private citizen who had become concerned that there were witches operating in his town. He decided to take action and reported their crimes to the authorities.

Unusually, however, he was then permitted to get involved in watching and questioning the accused and he built his reputation on the confession he extracted from Bess Clarke. Later, Hopkins went on to use the persuasive interrogation techniques of walking and watching on many other suspects, free of any official oversight.

This kind of amateur, free-ranging detective work – obsessive, bullying and with a whiff of dishonesty and delusion about it – is what people usually think of when they hear the word “witchfinder”.

• Read more | Witches in the dock: 10 of Britain’s most infamous witch trials

However, the idea of witchfinding has more professional roots. These reach back into the Inquisition of medieval Europe. In the 15th century, men like the German monk Heinrich Kramer were formally tasked by their employer, the Catholic church, with questioning suspected heretics. These suspects included both other clerics and ordinary villagers who were accused of holding unusual religious views.

And among the heretics who were summoned before them, some Inquisitors identified people whom they thought were witches. These were people who seemed to have some knowledge of magic and demonic spirits, and who also appeared to belong to communities of like-minded individuals.

The suspicion grew among Inquisitors that there was an organised conspiracy of witches meeting in secret to undermine true religion. Kramer and other Inquisitors extracted confessions from them, and documented the witches’ supposed activities in books known as demonologies. These were essentially manuals for official witchfinding.

Kramer was especially interested in links between witchcraft and women’s sex lives. He would ask each female suspect gently “where she was born and raised”, and then proceeded to get more personal. He moved from discussions “regarding her way of life” – a good life, would she say, or bad? – to sharp, embarrassing demands for information “about her virginity and other secret matters”.

The women he questioned across Germany and Austria in the 1480s reacted with disgust, and when they were rendered thoroughly vulnerable by shame, Kramer had them stripped and tortured on the rack until they admitted they were satanic conspirators.

He became obsessed with searching female bodies for charms thought to keep witches from confessing, and with identifying witchcraft aimed against powerful men – knights, archdukes and even Inquisitors.

However, his activities caused concern. People began to say that he “preached nothing except against witches” and “seems to me to be crazy”. Inquisitors like Kramer had turned an official role, one that was meant to be investigating all kinds of heresy, into a perverted personal crusade: the Inquisitor had become a witchfinder.

• Read more | A spell-binding history of witches

During the 15th century, witchfinding spread across Europe and reached Britain and Ireland. There were witchcraft trials in medieval Ireland, England and Scotland in church and royal courts. In the mid-16th century, it was decided that local government officers’ roles in Britain should include an element of witchfinding.

Witchcraft was defined as a felony, a serious crime, under parliamentary acts of 1542, 1563 and 1604, which moved it from the jurisdiction of churchmen into the
secular, criminal courts. This meant that local magistrates (justices of the peace or, in Scotland, baillies) were expected to investigate alleged witches and send them for trial by jury.

They were officials of the Tudor and Stuart state. But their witchfinding was part of a range of other crime-fighting activities. They were also involved in investigating theft, murder, reports of vagrants and con-artists travelling through their districts.

These witchfinders are less famous than their amateur colleagues like Matthew Hopkins, because instead of being obsessive specialists, they were general law-enforcers who had to deal with all types of reported crime. Witchcraft was only one aspect of their work – just like it was supposed to be for continental European Inquisitors.

Like some Inquisitors, a few magistrates did go beyond their brief: they pursued witches avidly.

In the early 1580s, English magistrate Brian Darcy read a demonology written by the French lawyer Jean Bodin, and tried out some of its recommendations on suspects. Bodin suggested that magistrates start their investigations by questioning child witnesses. “Arrest the witches’ young daughters,” he advised.

So, during a witch-hunt in 1582, Darcy questioned at least five children aged between six and 10 about their parents’ supposed crimes. Eight-year-old Phoebe Hunt said her mother Alice had “two little things like horses” which she fed “out of a black treening [wooden] dish”. Darcy searched the Hunt family’s home for such an item: wooden dishes were common homewares.

Then he asked Alice Hunt whether she had fed spirits out of “a little treening dish”. When she said “no”, he whipped out the dish in a dramatic reveal, as if it proved her a liar. It was a classic witchfinder move. In this case, torture wasn’t permitted, but it wasn’t needed: desolated by her daughter’s unwitting betrayal, Alice confessed.

Darcy may have been no gentleman, but not all witchfinders were male and not all were wealthy, powerful people either. Witchfinding was one of the few authoritative roles available to women in early modern Britain. They took on the role of searchers, inspecting the bodies of female suspects for physical evidence of witchcraft. In Britain, it was thought improper for men to do this job.

Hopkins worked with two such female searchers – Frances Mills and Mary Phillips – both of whom travelled with him and gave evidence against women they had searched. In one episode, Mills was employed to search a suspected witch called Margaret Moone, upon whom “she found three long teats… in her secret parts”.

These were thought to be nipples where animal familiars had sucked blood from witches, rewarding the familiars for the harm they did. Mills and Phillips concurred that, during their investigations, Moone had tried to attack them magically and verbally.

Phillips had fallen into a ditch as she entered Moone’s village, and she said that when she and Mills arrived, Moone called them “rogues”, shouting “who the devil sent for you?” Female witchfinders faced accusations of unsisterly betrayal, but working with male witchfinders brought them uncommon power.

Loathsome behaviour?

If no one else was available to search female suspects, random women would be invited to do it: in this way, anyone who happened to be called in – as if for jury service – could become a witchfinder.

In 1621 at the Old Bailey trial of the accused witch Elizabeth Sawyer, the searchers employed were two “grave matrons, brought in by the Officer out of the street, passing by there by chance” and a woman named Margaret Weaver who was the housekeeper of the Old Bailey judicial complex.

The suspected witch was appalled when she found she was to be strip-searched and “behaved herself most sluttishly and loathsomely towards them, intending thereby to prevent their search of her”.

However, the three searchers were determined: “According to the request of the court, and to that trust reposed in them by the bench, they all three severally searched her.” All gave evidence that she had a teat on her body, just above her anus. The indignity of this examination helped to break down the suspect, who confessed.

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In Scotland, both men and women worked as witchfinding “prickers”. This method of detecting witches involved stabbing them with a pin to check whether any areas of their body were insensible to pain. Like the teats found by Frances Mills, these numb areas were thought to be demonic marks.

At least 10 prickers operated in Scotland across the 17th century, the most notorious of whom was a woman, Christian Caddell. She dressed as a man and was employed by the local baillie to prick suspects in Elgin in 1662. Six people were executed on her evidence, although she herself was eventually accused of fraud.

Other methods of sorting the innocent from the guilty were used across Britain. The “swimming test” saw suspects thrown into water. Their left big toe was bound to their right thumb, and their right big toe to their left thumb. Ropes were attached to their waist to drag them out of the water when the test was complete. If suspects sank, they were innocent and were hauled out, gasping, cold and terrified. (A few people drowned during the test.)

And, famously, if a suspect floated, she or he was thought to be guilty because water, associated with Christian baptism, had miraculously rejected them. They were then sent for formal trial – but their terrible experiences had softened them up for confession.

The fact that professional and amateur witchfinders sought what they saw as reliable tests for witchcraft shows that, contrary to popular belief, they were not always charlatans, sadists or wholly delusional.

Many worked rationally and in good faith, believing themselves to be godly detectives or medical examiners, ridding their communities of criminals by attempting scientific proof of guilt.

While witchfinding did certainly attract cruel obsessives, it was also seen as public service. But despite the variety of their approaches and techniques, all witchfinders posed a terrifying threat to those people who were unlucky enough to be suspected of witchcraft.

Marion Gibson is professor of Renaissance and magical literatures at the University of Exeter. She appeared on our recent podcast series on the Salem witch trials and will be back on the podcast soon to discuss witchfinders: historyextra.com/podcast