This project began when I found the tale of the cannibal butchers. I was reading news stories produced at the end of Pope Urban VIII's reign (1623-1644) in the Vatican Library when the title of one particular pamphlet grabbed my attention:

Relation of the Infamous and Detestable Excesses of Four Wicked Brothers and Companions, Tyrant Butchers of Human Flesh, Sold by Them and Given as Food to the Same Mortals in the Year 1644.

I spent the rest of that afternoon transcribing the account and found that I could not stop thinking about the sensational tale that it told: four butchers who owned a shop near the Pantheon lured victims into the back room, where they murdered the men. The butchers then reportedly ground up their victims' bodies and added them to pork to make sausage. The details were incredible--the pamphlet explained the process of making human/pork sausage down to describing the pots used and the addition of "ginger" as a spice. It then recounted the slow-moving and tangled judicial process that eventually brought the malefactors to justice, ending with their execution in front of the Pantheon.

In trying to make sense of the cannibal butcher tale, I started with two questions: was the story true? Was it a popular story that circulated widely? What I found was that the story was likely fictional--it appears in several versions in popular newssheets, but not at all in the actual trial records of the period. However, the fact that several variations of the story exist across European archives--I found copies in Rome, London, and Florence--suggests it was a widely repeated and popular tale. Its sensational nature likely helped make it popular, but as I studied the various versions it became clear that it was also anti-papal invective. All the versions of the pamphlet alleged that this horrific act of cannibalism occurred because Romans--under papal impetus--had become so greedy for meat that when it ran out, they had to search for another source. Such was their gluttony that they did not even care if the meat they eventually got actually came from their fellow humans. Thus, the authors alleged, the heinous crime of cannibalism took place in Rome because residents there were so obsessed with meat eating that they abandoned their morals.

But, this led to another question: how could anyone be eating the amount of meat that the pamphlets claimed Romans consumed in the 1600s? The traditional story of this period is one in which resources contracted and many cities underwent profound famines in the early 1600s. In following up this next issue, I came to the discovery that an extraordinary amount of meat came into the city for a few decades. However, that extraction of resources from the land was not sustainable and eventually papal overreach led to a dramatic conflict--the War of Castro (1641-44)--which irrevocably shattered supply lines to the city. It was in the aftermath of this conflict that the cannibal butcher pamphlet--and plenty of other pamphlets critical of the papacy and its various policies--were written.

Ongoing thread. More from Bradford A. Bouley to follow.