Pope Leo III, the Pope who crowned Charlemagne (above), died today in the year 816. Their relationship was mutually advantageous – Charlemagne protected Leo from being murdered by his enemies, while Leo made Charlemagne the Roman Emperor, which changed the course of European history.
The Trial of the Talmud opened in the court of King Louis IX in Paris, today in 1240. This debate on the Jewish Talmud, one of the central texts of Judaism, was instigated by Nicholas Donin, a Jewish convert who wanted to trash his former faith and used the tried and tested method of cherry-picking the worst bits of the Talmud he could find. One passage he targeted describes Jesus in hell, boiling in excrement for all eternity, which Donin accused of blasphemy. The four rabbis defending the Talmud denied that the passage was referring to Jesus of Nazareth, saying, ‘Not every Louis born in France is king’, but no one was very convinced by that.
Elisabeth Wandscherer, one of the 16 wives of Jan van Leiden, the radical Anabaptist prophet, was executed today in 1535 at the hands of her own husband in the doomed city of Münster. The city had been taken over by a sect of Anabaptists, who declared the city to be the New Jerusalem, and then set about abolishing money and property owenership, baptising adults, driving out Catholics, and encouraging polygamy. Münster was besieged by the local Catholic bishop, and when Elisabeth asked her husband if she could leave the starving city, he responded by beheading her in the marketplace.
It is the feast of St Eskil, the Anglo Saxon missionary who was sent from England in the 11th century to help with the Christianisation of Sweden. The old gods were dying hard in Scandinavia, and Eskil was stoned to death because his evangelism was seen as a threat to the old pagan ways.
Image: Levan Ramishvili