• Pietro Della Vigna, a jurist, poet, and minister to Frederick II, committed suicide. Dante pictures him in hell in the Inferno.

• A Parisian jumped into the Seine. When he was rescued, he took communion before he died. His family claimed the body, arguing that he had died in a state of grace, but because he had attempted suicide and had been in his right mind, as shown by his repentance, the court sentenced his corpse to torture.

• Two women who had lived within the jurisdiction of the Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris committed suicide. Their bodies were buried without ceremony (enfouis).

• Pierre Crochet of Boissy-Saint-Léger killed himself while under suspicion of murder. The judicial arm of the Abbey of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés sentenced the body to be dragged through the streets, then hanged.

• A man committed suicide in Reims. The monks of Saint-Rémi had the body dragged and hanged, but the Parlement de Paris ordered them to hand over the cadaver to the archbishop, who alone held the right to hang criminals.

• Philippe Testard, a man a hundred years old who had been prévôt to the archbishop of Paris, got up in the night to urinate out the window and threw himself down to the street below. Brought back to his bed, he received the Eucharist but then stabbed himself. His heirs pleaded his insanity to avoid confiscation of his estate. During the trial twelve witnesses attested to his odd behavior: "He did so many silly things that everyone said he was out of his senses."

• A man living within the jurisdiction of the Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris committed suicide, and the abbey had his body hanged. Soon after, the royal prévôt ordered the abbey to repeat the execution, first "dragging the said murderer" through the streets behind a horse, a rite that the abbey had neglected to perform.

• Adam Le Yep, a freeholder in Worcestershire, was reclassified a serf because of his extreme poverty. Rejecting the social demotion, he drowned himself in the Severn.

• Raoul de Nesles rushed headlong into the melee during the Battle of the Golden Spurs at Courtrai, preferring certain death to the humiliation of defeat.

• Jacquet de Fransures, a peasant in revolt, strangled himself in prison "with the rope that tied him around the shoulders, and murdered himself in desperation."

• Several persons were executed following Charles VI's return to Paris. "The wife of one of these," Jean Juvénal des Ursins tells us, "who was great with child, threw herself from the window of her house and killed herself."

• When soldiers pushed him to desperation by their rapacious demands, Jean Lunneton, a tenant farmer of the Abbey of Chaalis, hanged himself. The abbey ordered confiscation of his estate, but eventually permitted his wife to inherit, "in consideration of the fact that one cannot know for sure if the said event occurred because of the desperation of her said late husband or otherwise."

• After several days of illness, Jean Masstoier decided to drown himself in the river. Saved in time but still suffering from "melancholy of the head," he threw himself down a well.

• A pious and wealthy burgher in Strasbourg, Hugelinus Richter, confessed, took communion, then jumped into the Bruche River.

• When his wife fell ill, Pierre le Vachier, a retired butcher from Sarcelles who had been ruined by the civil war and had lost two of his children, not only was left destitute but also felt totally abandoned. He "went to hang himself from a tree, where he died and strangled himself." The chronicle adds that he was obviously "tempted by the enemy [the devil]."

• "By the temptation of the enemy and on the occasion of his said madness and illness," Denisot Sensogot, a Paris baker who had contracted an infectious disease, hanged himself. His case was brought to trial to determine whether his act was to be attributed to the influence of the devil (in which case his body would be dragged, hanged, and deprived of Christian burial, and his goods would be confiscated) or to madness (frénésie), which would exculpate him. His widow, pregnant and the mother of a year-old daughter, petitioned that he be declared mad, as "it would be a very hard thing for the said widow ... to lose their goods and chattels by such a decision; moreover their relatives and friends, people of note and of good family, would be vilified if the body of the deceased were executed."

• Michelet le Cavalier, a Paris embroiderer stricken by an illness that brought him terrible suffering, threw himself out of the window.

• Jeannette Mayard, a shoemaker's wife and a good Catholic but given to drink and jealousy, hanged herself.

• A woman known to be insane got up in the middle of the night. "Her husband asked her where she was going and she answered that she wanted to go relieve herself. Thus the said woman went about the house stark naked, then threw herself into a well a good thirteen arm-widths deep."

• Philippe Braque, a barrister of the Parlement de Paris and a man some fifty years of age, committed suicide in the basement of his house.

• A journeyman in Metz hanged himself after a quarrel over a girl.

Fragmentary though it is, this rapid survey of the suicides of ordinary people in the Middle Ages, drawn from memoirs, journals kept by clerics and burghers, and surviving judiciary records, shows that suicide was practiced in all social categories and by both men and women.

Voluntary death was seen as the result of diabolic temptation induced by despair or as mad behavior. The act, condemned as murder, led to savage punishment inflicted on the dead body and to confiscation of the estate of the deceased. At times the judges showed a degree of indulgence by taking into account the circumstances of the death and the family's situation.

Civil and ecclesiastical justice collaborated to repress suicide. Suicides had a variety of reasons for taking their own lives: poverty, illness, physical suffering, fear of punishment, honor, reaction to humiliation, love, and jealousy.

Only an insignificant number of cases appear in chronicles and court records, however. In a ground-breaking article Jean-Claude Schmitt discusses fifty-four cases of suicide over a period of nearly three centuries.

As Schmitt remarks, such a "limited and heterogeneous" sampling "cannot be subjected to the statistical manipulations devised by sociologists." Establishing a suicide rate for medieval Europe that might permit comparison with other ages seems an impossible dream.

Without going as far as Félix Bourquelot, who stated in 1842 that in the twelfth century "a mania for suicide penetrated all classes of society," we can say that there seems to be no evidence that voluntary death occurred any less often in the Middle Ages than in any other period.

To the contrary, the many laws that were passed, both canon and civil, the number of philosophical and theological pronouncements made on the subject, the absence of expressions of surprise in the chronicles, and the dockets of court cases regarding voluntary homicide all show that suicides occurred with some regularity. Moreover, recent sociological studies have shown that the suicide rate remains stable in all types of society.

Noble Substitutes For Suicide In The Middle Ages

Even though the Middle Ages (unlike pagan classical antiquity) stand out as having almost no illustrious suicides, it seems improbable that medieval society was an exception to the rule.

There was no medieval Lucretius, no Brutus, Cato, or Seneca, and the discredit that an omnipresent Catholicism cast on a practice it considered cowardly quite certainly had an effect on the elites--social circles restricted to limited numbers and profoundly marked by clerical influence.

The way of life of the warrior aristocracy, however, did include behaviors that substituted for suicide and were an indirect means of suicide: Tournaments might in many ways be likened to "gaming suicides," as could judiciary duels and the various forms of the judgment of God.

Omnipresent war was both an essential safety valve for suicidal impulses and a deterrent to direct suicide. It is known that the suicide rate declines sharply in times of war, when group cohesion is reinforced and a sense of solidarity, shared emotions, and a desire for victory give life purpose and enhance a taste for existence.

One of the time-honored psychological explanations for suicide is that in the majority of cases individuals turn against themselves aggressive impulses that could not be directed at others in civilized societies.

The Merovingian warrior, the knight of the age of chivalry, and later the mercenary soldier were by no means inhibited by pacifist prohibitions, and free expression of violence against their contemporaries served to diminish their own self-destructive tendencies.

We can see from many examples how the interplay between an externalized aggression and the risking of one's life on a permanent and voluntary basis produced an effective substitute for direct suicide. Jean Froissart tells us that in the fourteenth century ninety knights chose slaughter on the battlefield over retreat before enemy forces.

Similarly, the Chroniques de Flandre recount that at Courtrai in 1302, Raoul de Nesles declared that "he no longer wanted to live when he saw all the flower of Christendom dead." The rules of the chivalric Order of the Estoile founded by King John II (Jean le Bon) forbade flight from battle.

The Crusades provide a long list of similar events. Guibert de Nogent notes that many Christians drowned themselves rather than be taken by the Turks, "preferring to choose their manner of death." Jean de Joinville witnessed similar scenes, which at times involved ecclesiastics.

The bishop of Soissons refused to accept defeat and threw himself at the Turks, meeting certain death. Louis IX's queen, Marguerite de Provence, asked an aged knight to cut off her head should the Saracens threaten to take her. When Joinville and his companions were about to be taken prisoner, one cleric exclaimed, "I am for letting us all be killed if we are going right to heaven!"

His suggestion was not taken, but it illustrates the attitudes of chivalry, when knights refused to see voluntary martyrdom as suicide. The same frame of mind can be seen in certain religious orders: In Seville in the thirteenth century, for instance, Franciscans taunted Muslims by shouting insults about Mohammed. continued here

info on this page is from history of suicide
by georges minois
© the johns hopkins university press