Swiss Battle of 1499 - Medieval Dead - S03 EP05 - History Documentary

[Music] a land of lakes and mountains  a bridge at the edge of Empire our perception of medieval Switzerland is  probably somewhat distorted farmers who became soldiers soldiers all  Europe fi Warriors who held back an emperor you'd kill them as fast as you could  there's no doubt about it medieval war a roll of the dice the bones of the Dead you lose you  die you never go home was just a a Slaughter it was a disaster in the shadow of mountains  No Quarter asked or given the skulls of dorak the

Medieval World the 5th to the 15th  century Tim southernland is one of Britain's most experienced archaeologists he and a team  of Specialists try to understand medieval Life by exploring the realm of the medieval dead we  have a classic view of the story book medieval life we don't hear the stories about the  common man trying to keep his family alive archeologically speaking we can  now focus in on the medieval dead people you couldn't help almost look through  their eyes thinking what did the

y see how did they die the story of of Dak and its great battle is  the story of donak and its skull it was fought in 1499 at the very end of the medieval period And  it marked the end of a very bloody war yet it was also the beginning of something the long struggle  to national awareness and Independence of the country of Switzerland the price was high in lives  born as ever by Everyday People farmers peasants yet also by the men who fought who left behind  their valleys and homes to take their

place In Harm's Way and play The Deadly game of Hazard that  was the solders life in medieval times we'll delve into the life of the soldier in this world whether  they fought for money or drink or for something greater The Remains left to us now are the same  will investigate why and how some of them fought and will try to bring new light to the strange  story of the bones of men who died fighting in a Savage battle more than 600 years ago who were  these men whose only remains now are the sku

lls of dor the traces of the ones who went before are  all around us our ancestors and forbears of the Middle Ages whether they were Kings or peasants  they left their Mark the structures they built castles and Cathedrals the things they made the  weapons they fought with the graves in which they lay rarely if ever do we see Among  Us in plain sight the remains of the individuals themselves yet in  a street in a small town in the heart of Europe there are part  of everyday life the medieval [App

lause] dead more than 40 human skulls believed to  be some of the Dead from the Battle of dorak many of them bear trauma evidence  of weapon injuries some perhaps causes of death in itself it's an arresting site as  a monument to a medieval battle it's perhaps unique [Music] Switzerland a small landlocked  country with a population of just 8 million people most of them centered on a plateau bordered  by the natural frontiers of the Alps and the Jura its larger cities Geneva and Zurich are among

the  most important Financial Centers in the world the country itself one of the most developed it's the  home of the International Red Cross and has a long history of armed neutrality it hasn't been at War  since 1815 and the time of Napoleon it's still known officially as the Swiss Confederation  a title which originated in the Middle Ages it wasn't One Nation called Switzerland as  we know it today it was a league an alliance of small territories known know as cantons at the  time of dor ther

e were eight today there are 26 our knowledge of the region is usually hazy  when compared with France or Britain or Germany in the Middle Ages it's got the castles it's got  the big lakes it's got really beautiful scenery and people think they probably know more about  it than they actually do and it's only when you get down to the details you realize it's a place  that was quite important in the medieval period our perception of medieval Switzerland is probably  somewhat distorted and we don't

really know much about it all I certainly don't anyway in the great  scheme of things it's quite a small region it's a mountainous region but even so geographically it's  a very small area and for some reason in the later medieval period it becomes incredibly important  and that's an anomaly we like to investigate towards the end of the 50 from the beginning of  the 16th centuries the people of this small region had a disproportionate influence on many important  events and battles of Central E

urope there was a strength in their character a belief in the way  they were bound together in the face of adversity you have an echo of this in the Swiss now um  I think the Swiss like the English owe a lot of their um their General character to geography  in England we we live in an island and we've been able to fight off most Invaders because we live  on an island and so do the Swiss they live in a sort of island of lakes and mountains and by being  united and get and getting all the people t

ogether they have fought off Invaders and threats Tim  has come to Switzerland to find out more about this character the country and its extraord  ordinary place in medieval history the Battle of D was the final act in a conflict that began 7  months before it was called in Germany desit Cree the Swiss War now it's more commonly known as  Des schwaben Creek the suian war it was fought between the Swiss cantons and the greatest  power in Europe the Holy Roman Empire it was called Holy Roman but t

he empire was German  suabia was an ancient region of Southwestern Germany encompassing the areas known today as  B berenberg and Bavaria it was the homeland of the original Holy Roman Emperor Charlamagne  the great and of several historic dynasties among them the Holland and the vels ancestors  of the hanoverians and the British royal family family most powerful of all were the habsburgs  whose King maximilan the ruled the Empire at the very end of the 15th century in early  1499 local disputes

came about over control of trade routes through the mountain passes  between suia and the cantons argument turned to Skirmish rape and counter rap suia  called on the support of its Habsburg King and Emperor the smaller cantant locked  arms for Mutual support as the Confederacy the inevitable outcome was war from January  to July 1499 fighting raged through the Rin Valley to Lake constant but if the habsburgs  and swabians were expecting to crush the small cantons they were mistaken again and a

gain  the Confederacy took them on and saw them off on July the 19th 1499 an Imperial  Army of around 16,000 men attacked Soler intending to besiege and capture  the important Frontier castle at DOR instead 3 days later on July the 22nd  they suffered a shocking total defeat no surrender was taken even the Imperial  wounded were killed hundreds perhaps thousands of bodies lay strewn across the  landscape from the castle to the bridge and Beyond Tim's here in Dak to see for himself the  scene of

the [Music] battle Hans fley is the curator of dak's Museum ah he's here to show Tim  around hello Hans hi nice to meet you nice to meet you yes historical Place yeah yeah okay this is so  this is the bridge this is the bridge it's not the original bridge but uh the the original Bridge was  a wooden bridge this is the place where the only bridge for a lot of kilometers stood and this the  only Bridge uh for the people coming from France uh and and the and the back backland up to the  the center

of of Switzerland so this was right an important river crossing it was an important  uh River Crossing because here was the commercial place so the castle is on the hill behind the  Z yes yes dor or dor Castle dominates The View over the beer River Valley for miles around  the Imperial Commander Heinrich Von fenberg knew that Swiss cannons up here could shoot down  to Harris's troops as they approached also the bridge was a symbol of the Canton of solon's  politic iCal autonomy the commander of

the castle was more or less the representative of the  of the state and and here was an important meeting and Commercial place with Customs post people  passing with with merchandise they had they had to pay here it was a an official Crossing from  for the Canton of of of solotone so it was that big it was that important it was important yeah it  was it was important and basically the the battle was about that castle and this bridge exactly it  was it was the will of the of the emperor and of He

nri V Fen to destroy that castle which would  allow the the troops to to go into the heart of Switzerland across the Jura and if you could  hold this bridge um you could you could stop the invad the inad come in stop and it was the last  battle between the the Empire and swiss but it wasn't really the end of of all the the struggles  between the two parties today today doruk is part of the suburban sprawl a few kilometers from The  Busy city of Basel in 1499 it was a much smaller town the Imperi

al troops crossed into the town  here some climbed the hill to established Siege lines beneath the castle that left many of them  with time on their hands all around here they fell to drinking or gaming in the taverns their  Camp they had no idea that they were gambling all time Hans is an expert in coins and artifacts of  the classical world but he's always been involved with the story of dorak and its little known  battle so when did you first become involved with the with the donut collection

or when did  you first hear about it yeah I mean I was I was born here I was I grow I grow up here but it's  the strange chain of events involving the human remains from the battle which in a way is the most  compelling part of the doruk [Music] story after a medieval battle there's often a discernable  pattern of events concerning the disposal of the Dead Tim knows this from his work Excavating  the mass grave of the battle of ton in northern England thousand of dead were buried on the  battle

field in pits then some years later they were dug up again and reburied in consecrated  ground with a dedicated Chapel it's a pattern he's also seen at aljaba in Portugal and he probably  common and many other European battlefields of the Middle Ages but dorak was different part  of the after battle Pat fits but with one major difference because they're still here for all  to see the battlefield dead this is the first time that Tim SE so this is really interesting  for me because I've heard so m

any stories about collections of human battlefields uh and usually  they're they're put in something like a mass grave or they're put in something like a chapel  yes uh this is really unusual because obviously it's on display and apparently it always has  been or a long time yes more or less I mean uh initially they they were also in a in a chapel  the chapel was built in the 17th century between the monastery and and the street and when they  constructed the railroad line from Basel to Geneva u

h in 1872 they just demolished the the Chapel  to in in order to be able to to to construct the street up to the to the station the 17th century  Chapel was somewhere here no one knows what it looked like whatever was left is now beneath the  road at the end of the 19th century at the time of the 400th Jubilee commemorations a replacement was  built much smaller little more than an elaborate U but it was only for some of the BS a fraction of  what had been in the 17th century Chapel before there

was no Monument just the osui yeah but if  you see photographs of the old or a p pyramid of of skulls but then half a century later the  layout was redeveloped again in 1949 when the large expressionist Monument was created to  celebrate modern Switzerland's Independence and the unique story of dak's Bones continued when  they built the monument in 1949 uh that initial uary was demolished and just a few of the skulls  were integrated presented here with the monument the rest were stored and the

se have been here ever  since yeah since 49 yes it's very unusual to have these on display to the general public for for  us it's very it's it's nothing unusual to to see these calls and probably today nobody really pays  attention to them even passing by I mean a lot of people they probably do not even know what the  monument is for and what the skulls have to do here I think it's really fitting that that people  can actually come up here and contemplate you know the memorial the battle you kno

w their own  existence and everything else and it's in that respect it's really unusual but I think it's quite  appropriate really life in the small busy suburb goes on for someone who spent years searching for  the dead from medieval battles even unearthing them with his own hands it's taking some time to  get used to the monument here it's very unusual to have a a monument of this size and scale and  it's right in the center of the town but what's more unusual is that there's a collection of 

skulls behind uh basically in in a glass case on the side of the monument and these skulls are the  people who died at the Battle of donak I've heard the stories about the skulls of Dak I've I've  read the the uh the papers the archaeological papers here they are displaying how they died  basically and what weapons kill them you see those huge sword cuts slashes across the skulls and all  the depressions and the stab wounds and the it's unbelievable and to to have it on display one of  the inter

esting questions is who these people are they're evidently the people who fought in the  battle you can tell that by the skull injuries but we don't know who these who they are just who  these dead represent is a question that will take some answering as for the mystery of where the  rest of them are Hans has been able to piece together some of the evidence the regional Museum  of which he curator the haat museum is based in one of dak's oldest churches after 1949 some of  the Surplus bones were

buried in the churchyard here marked Now by this sculpture then 5 years  later they were on the move yet again okay and then in 54 uh the Bones have been removed and they  have been placed in another osy down uh closer to the museum on the way they see the churchyard  also contains Echoes of those earlier now vanished monuments so that's the OS where they have removed  the Bones from up here down here in 54 they didn't exist before so this is the sarcophagus so you  think the long bones are in

here yes definitely yes they have been removed from the Small Monument  up up there and and put here in 54 and it says here uh Wanderer stay still uh here are the  bones of the heroes from the Battle of dorno 1499 the sarcophagus hasn't been open since but H  believes this is the end of the line for the bones that remained in DNA the 17th century Chapel 1899  1949 and 1954 it's curious how these numbers of the dorak skeletons have moved around the town  but it is similar to how Bones from many o

ther medieval battlefields were treated inside there's  a clue as as to who the dead were yeah and uh now we have the frescos on the wall and uh here are  buried the three commanders of the German troops the Imperial troops and Henri V fenberg and two of  his subcommanders henr Maas V castart on her bit lenberg Von fenberg had gone forward to check his  artillery positions in The Siege lines before Don Castle as you may know graph Henri V fenb was  one of the first to to be killed people warned

him be because he didn't put up guards and when  people warned him he just said why should I put up Gods it will not snow Swiss soldiers  here all across donak and the German Camp the Empire's soldiers were at their ease they  expected a long but successful seed when the Swiss commanders saw how careless uh the German  troops were they were drinking they were eating they had music playing uh they were enjoying  their life they were swimming in the in the [Music] river so they decided to just hav

e  a fast attack yeah they took advantage of the situation they took advantage at the the  situation and gra Henrich from first was one of the first to to just be killed and that  gave a completely disaster to the there was no organization anymore the the three highest  ranking commanders of the Imperial Army were buried here in dorak is significant often  in medieval battles the bodies of nobles were reclaimed by their households for burial  on home soil they sent some monks here to ask and the

commander of the Swiss cantons left the  decision up to the commander of the of the C of solor and then they said no the knights have to  stay with the peasants and that's the reason why Henry V fenar and two of his subcommanders are  buried in the in the in the in the Church of D yeah I think we've got a clue here as to who  these individuals who these group of people were some of the losing nights obviously buried in  this part of the church they were initially taken off the battlefield were

brought into consecrated  ground moved on several occasions through through different osies until we come to the situation  today where we can see them by the side of the road on the modern Memorial they didn't allow  the high status individuals to be taken away and so that's definitely a clue as to who we're  looking at how did the crushing Victory come about why was it so comprehensive how was the 16,000  strong highly equipped highly motivated Army of the most powerful Empire in Europe destro

yed  utterly by the lowly soldiers of the Swiss cantal especially as the Imperial Army faced  a Swiss force of only around 6,000 men mostly infantry with relatively few armored Knights on  Horseback burn was one of the larger cantons in the SW Confederation in 1499 its famous bear is  today used as a national symbol of the whole of modern Switzerland the Museum of burn houses  many artifacts relating to the events of this time in the medieval period I'm Susan Marty I'm  an AR historian and respo

nsible for the medieval collection of the um Museum in burn and now we are  in our permanent exhibition which deals with the history of Switzerland in the late 15th and early  16th century the leaders of the cantons which came together to fight the suian war were realists  they knew they couldn't equal numerically the military might of the Holy Roman Empire and its  armored Cavalry and its powerful Siege artillery but they knew they could count on one thing the  solidity of their own soldiers Sw

iss troops of the late 15th century were regarded even at the  time as tough opponents just as the Imperial Commander Von fenberg found out to his Peril the  majority of the Swiss were peasant Farmers cowards soldiering and campaigning came naturally to  them they were tough self-reliant bound together by loyalty to Family Village or Canton unlike  Knights they weren't used to horses or jousting or fighting tournaments they wore relatively  little armor if any the heart of their strength was not

just the weapons they used long Spears  Pikes or poon but in the way they fought with them they were um organized strong together in  formation in in a kind of square and then the outside they had the Pikeman with their  long weapons and in the inner part they had the the So-Cal normal soldiers and  they were really trained to hold always together always hold together even against  the best Cavalry the Empire can throw at them disciplined infantry who hold their nerve  hold their position they

can defeat Cavalry if they can keep Cavalry at a distance the man on  foot is not at a disadvantage merely because he's on foot he has many advantages his greatest  Advantage is when he has numbers discipline holds his nerve and has a weapon which can keep the  Horseman whether he's an armored Horseman or not keep him at a distance and if possible kill  his horse and in the harsh economics of War Swiss infantry armed with just Spears or Pikes were  vastly cheaper than armored Imperial Knights ev

en the best infantry with the best equipment  for infantry are cheaper than Cavalry they don't need so much armor in fact they don't want so much  armor because they've got to actually carry it and walk in it or fight in it rather than sitting on  a horse their Weaponry is generally simpler and cheaper but you need the numbers and you need the  discipline discipline but also a cohesion brought about by a shared culture small communities in  a mountainous region Jerry emilton is a writer and arti

st in a career spanning more than half a  century he's created artwork for newspapers books and magazines even including classic British  Comics like Eagle much of his work has been as an historical illustrator and the medieval is  one period that just hooked him it's one of the reasons why he now lives and works in Switzerland  I've worked intensively in different periods and I tend to being a little bit mad go deeply into  the things I do I was commissioned to do some medieval work I found the

subject fascinating I  mov to Switzerland and on every street corner is a castle there's wonderful documentation in the  Swiss Chronicles which were made by the towns to record all the events just a lot of very  inspiring sources and a lot of um of arms and armor Jerry's illustrations are renowned for their  realism and historical detail to imagine how it actually was for them you have to step into the  world of fiction but then nearly all history is is to a certain extent fiction we have to im

agine  how the these guys felt and I with in the figure making and in my drawings I need to know what  they're wearing what they're eating how well they are because obviously you can you can write  a list this man is sick he was Ill all night he's got dentry and he's now facing the enemy for the  first time or he slept very well last night he's eaten a good good meal he's with all his mates  they won a victory yesterday you have completely different feeling and I I believe that's very  important

and you can read in the Contemporary accounts how a Victorious Army is going to win  another Victory usually and and once they start there is a momentum Jerry believes some of this  momentum in the Swiss troops was due to the tough simple background they shared growing up in a  mountainous land every day could be a matter of survival um I think the Swiss like the English  owe a lot of their um their General character to geography in England we we live in an island  and we've been able to fight

off most Invaders because we live on an island and so do are  the Swiss they live in a sort of island of lakes and mountains and by being united and  get and getting all the people together they have fought off Invaders and threats hardened by a  mountain in life reliant on nobody but themselves and their comrades these were the troops against  whom the soldiers of the Empire found themselves ped burn mus Museum's collection contains  a number of the dorak skulls they arrived here in the early 2

0th century after the  pyramid Monument was redeveloped and the rest of the bones went into the church  Susan Marty knows from the accounts the uncompromising way the Victorious Swiss did not  allow the Empire to recover its dead Noble or otherwise normally the um losers could bury their  own victims right after the battle but the Swiss did prohibit that and so these corpses were lying  out on the battlefield and could not be buried which was a very unusual thing even for medieval  behavior on t

he battlefield after a [Music] battle there was more than the usual degree of emnity  between opponents in a medieval battle in Europe usually there was at least some trace of decorum  some observance of custom in disposing of the Dead Instead This was a war in which feelings  particularly among the Swiss cantons ran strong it was them against an Empire if they lost there  would likely be no more swiss [Music] cantons but what of the other missing Bones the skulls  left over from the pyramid and

the earlier 17th century monuments one woman has made it  her business to try and find out my name is Christine Cooper and I'm a physical Anthropologist  specialized in human remains from archaeological excavations Christine became involved with a  little known story of the donak bones through her study of victims of later battlefields I  had been examining Battlefield remains from 1790 1799 to Napoleonic Wars but I wasn't very  satisfied with the things I was able to do and especially with the

things I was not able  to do so I wanted to take that step further I happened to be in dorak a long time ago maybe  15 years ago and I heard that a battle had taken place and I asked well do they have any human  remains but nobody knew at the time but since that point I had them in my mind and I wanted to  get hold of them if they did exist and it turned out they did Christine was allowed access to  analyze the bones at the monument and dor at church but but as for the rest no one seemed  to kn

ow where they all were she had to track them down eventually she located more than  a hundred more individuals in museums and universities across Switzerland it took years  of work but Christine was eventually to bring all this research together I wanted to know  more about this SC of Dak especially who these people were and what happened to them in 14 99  there are many similarities between Christine's findings and Tim's at ton two archaeological  contexts two battles hundreds of miles apart uh

these are some of the  schools that we've excavated at ton obviously there are certain  parallels between our assemblage and and the work you've been looking at  and some of them are incredibly similar yet the battles were fought only around  40 years apart and many of the weapons and ways of fighting and dying were the same we've  also got a significant amount of uh blunt force trauma so something like a club or a mace or even  a hammer and that's impacted upon the usually the skull as well so

that seems to be similarish to  what you're getting at donak it is very similar except that I didn't find that much blond force  trauma all right at some cases but not that many so that would suggest that these individuals  didn't uh their death didn't occur by something like a mace or a hammer or something and it was  purely by either blades or stabbing yes most of them I think I had one or two with massive blun  Force but not many right most of them had blade wounds that you said and that was

the very biggest  part of all injuries it was mostly these trauma marks caused apparently by blades that Christine  selected for a careful and ingenious study so can you talk us through some of these experiments you  carried out please okay I had original weapons of this time copied by a blacksmith and we just  copied relevant Parts like the blade of of swords halberts and points of Pikes and similar  things and then we inflicted injuries on a head martle which behaves like a head of Life perso

n  and tried to reconstruct what could have caused these injuries on the dnak skulls it depended on  the size of the weapon and the small ones we were able to drop them onto the head model and the big  ones we had to fasten them on the bottom as you can see in this case and the skull dropped onto  the weapon and so we had a defined weight mass that came down and a defined height so we could  calculate the kinetic energy of each of these injuries the head head model that Christine  created was a

hollow plastic sphere filled with gelatine to represent the brain it  was covered in a layer of skin made from thin latex the experiments were filmed at high  speed most of the results were extremely close in resemblance to the trauma on the skulls  in most cases it was perfect if you look at one with a blade you can see that it produces  absolutely realistic lesions and there goes the blade and you see resulting exactly is  exactly what we saw the experiments give a disturbing impression of the

brutality of  medieval close quarter combat trauma on one skull in particular intrigued Christine she  theorized that it might have been inflicted by a particular kind of weapon known to have  been in use at the time of the battle of Da it had a wavy blade like a flame and so it  became known as a flambard or a flaming shert a fire sword I wasn't sure what might have  caused those lesions but i s him again when I did this experiment with one of those  plates so you carried out an experiment wit

h a blade of that type and It produced  the same injuries as it did on the skull that's fantastic so if we can see that here  then oh yeah I can yeah I see what you mean M that's very distinctive I've never  seen anything like that before I saw them only on one skull so I don't  think they were used very com very rare yes but it's fantastic that there's  an example of it uh and you you managed to replicate it as well and  produce the same results which is unbelievable I think that's great and th

at's  exactly what you saw in the injury mhm if it was too deep you'd never see that double  indentation would you so I presume it's under ideal circumstances or it's just shallow  enough to show the double depression and the double cut so it's unbelievable there really  is evidence for that I'm really impressed with that so that's fantastic flam and schs are often  depicted in images from the period but they were thought to be used just for display or parade I  was told it's more like a weapon

to represent but not to actually use because it's just too big and  too cumbersome it seems like they used it anyway sometimes I can't believe you've got evidence  of that when you find something archaeologically then you've reproduced the the classic experiments  and produce exactly the same results but to have the osteological evidence in the first place is  unbelievable and it's must be incredibly rare I was fascinating I me every time when I saw one  of these Legions appear that looked reali

stic it was exciting because I knew I had found  something more to help explain all this stuff of all the blade trauma on the skulls however only  a few of the injuries were likely to have been fatal blows without the rest of the skeletons it's  impossible to know exactly how these men died but one thing's for certain their last moments were  bloody brutal and perhaps frenzy the petrifying last instance of men on the losing side they  knew surrender was impossible these were the individuals the

men behind the anonymous  masks left to us now the skulls of dawn Imperial soldiers Germans perhaps even Swiss from  canton's not yet part of the Confederation United in one respect they were The Losers of a battle  left unburied by the victors and displayed for centuries Ever After at the time perhaps it was a  warning to others who might try to follow in their footsteps this was the very early dawning of  the national identity the independence of the region which would one day become Switzerla

nd to  us now like all war memorials it's a reminder of what Havoc mankind is capable of wreaking  in War Medieval or otherwise doruk Castle on the heights overlooking the battlefield  yeah so here you can see the whole the whole Battlefield and uh from here the Defenders  would have seen the Imperial troops utterly routed by the Swiss so too would they have  seen the bodies of the defeated soldiers left in their many hundreds exposed to  the elements for months years after the battle it's diffi

cult not to think about the  individuals that get caught up in a battle such as this we've seen how graphically some of them  were killed we've got extensive skull trol the victors obviously disperse and the victims  they're Left Behind everybody else will go back to their homes but for these people they  will be forever associated with the Battle of [Music] [Applause] Dak [Music]