What do you do when your enemy has the gall to die before you can adequately humiliate or exact proper punishment upon him? Well, you need not let mere death get in the way of retribution.
10. Gilles van Ledenberg - Coffin Hung And Dumped In A Ditch
The Netherlands had an 80-year struggle (1568–1648) with Spain that was interposed with the Twelve Years' Truce (1609–21). After the decades-long conflict ended, the Dutch immediately engaged in a petty theological dispute among themselves.
They clashed over predestination and the exact time that God decides whether a soul will be admitted to Heaven. There were also political concerns over whether to resume the war, and tensions increased between the centralized government and the provinces.
In the 1610s, the situation began to spiral out of control when the more moderate Remonstrant Party fell from power in the face of pressure from the more strictly orthodox Counter-Remonstrants and Prince Maurice, commander of the army.
One of the arrested Remonstrant leaders was Gilles van Ledenberg. He committed suicide in September 1618 but was sentenced to death the following May.
Thus, the coffin containing his embalmed corpse was hung on a gallows for three weeks before being buried. The night that it was buried, however, a mob dug up van Ledenberg's remains and tossed them in a ditch.
9. Jacopo Bonfadio - Beheading And Burning
Jacopo Bonfadio was an Italian humanist scholar who was noted for his poetry, his conversations about landscapes, and his philosophy. He also wrote a history of Genoa that censured several of the city's leading families by revealing the truth of their past misdeeds. This was a bad idea because he was living in Genoa at the time.
Those powerful families seized on a rumor that Bonfadio had seduced one of his students. As a result, he was condemned to death for the "crime" of sodomy. This sentence produced a great scandal, and many intellectuals throughout Italy mobilized to save him.
They were unsuccessful, but Bonfadio was given the relative mercy of being beheaded before his burning. In a letter supposedly written before his death, Bonfadio evinced a remarkable calm because "all will be devoured by time" and those condemning him would also die one day.
His death was so well-known that it was used to rebuke the Genoese government over two centuries later when they conveniently "lost" the files of Bonfadio's trial.
8. Cunimund - Bejeweled Skull Cup
In-laws can be a pain—that's the trope anyway. However, you should not kill your father-in-law and turn his skull into a drinking cup as this will cause marital discord. Alboin, a sixth-century king of the Lombards, learned this the hard way. He had a long-running enmity with the Gepids, partly as a result of his killing the Gepid prince Thorismund in his youth.
In 567, Alboin defeated the Gepids in battle and killed their king Cunimund (probable Thorismund's brother). The victory was decisive—the Gepids virtually ceased to exist—and Alboin helped himself to two trophies.
The first was the skull of his rival, which was fashioned into a gold-plated, jewel-encrusted chalice. The second was Cunimund's daughter, Rosamund, whom Alboin took as his wife.
Thereafter, Alboin led the Lombards in their successful invasion of Italy. In celebration of these achievements, he held a banquet in Verona in 572 during which he made his wife drink out of her father's skull.
As a result, Rosamund murdered her husband. She either carried out the deed herself while he was in a drunken stupor or seduced and blackmailed one of the king's retainers.
