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8. A famous European city built on a dung heap

All right! If you are the owner of the castle, you can naturally restrain the servants with harsh laws, drive them out of the yard to defecate, and find a place away from the living room to pile up garbage and feces. However, always looking at the dozens of people in the castle, as well as the unchanged fields and mountains outside, you will definitely get tired of it after a long time...... So, why don't you go to the city for a stroll?

Well, in medieval Europe, despite its vast and sparsely populated countryside, wilderness, and aristocratic lords squatting in castles, there were still a few decent cities to be found - Cologne in Germany, Vienna in Austria, Paris and Marseille in France, and the great Rome...... Although these cities usually had a population of only a few tens of thousands for most of the Middle Ages, they were always livelier than small castles.

However, before you enter the city, it is best to put a cloth on your nose and spray some perfume if you can.

Belch? Why? Some digressions here, I don't know if you have read it, in the Western fantasy novel "A Song of Ice and Fire", the acting "little devil" Lord Tyrion, took his **** country **** into King's Landing, and the **** complained to Tyrion all day long in bed that this place was too smelly - it was still a high-end villa hidden by the Prime Minister's Golden House!

Then, Tyrion reluctantly said to **** that living in a big city is to endure this smell.

Later, Tyrion went to the city gate to meet a prince from the desert, "Red Viper" Oberon, who was also smoked by the stench at the city gate for a long time, and finally pinched his nose and reluctantly entered the city.

Most of the European cities in the Middle Ages were indeed dirty and smelly, so people always liked to take a bunch of lavender while walking.

At that time, Europeans basically did not think of building new sewers, even if they inherited the legacy of the ancient Roman Empire, which had been abandoned for hundreds of years, they were almost clogged - the construction of underground drainage systems required a lot of money, and at that time there were frequent wars, and the lords themselves were not sure how long their rule would last, and in the eyes of the nobles, the people were just tools for making taxes, and how could they have the energy to think about the happiness of the people?

To make matters worse, Europeans at that time did not know how to use manure, and there were no farmers on the roads of the cities and villages who were free cleaners!

In this way, a small castle with only a few dozen people can be made so dirty by medieval Europeans who do not pay attention to hygiene, and the "big city" of tens of thousands of people will inevitably emit a foul smell everywhere, and it will be horribly dirty.

In fact, when you're in the city, you'll not only have to be on the lookout for dog poop (mainly human and horse feces in the Middle Ages), just like modern people, but you'll also have to watch out for falling objects – according to the bad habits inherited from the Roman Empire, European city dwellers like to dump their feces and urine directly from their windows.

The difference is that cities in the Roman Empire were still cleaned up, while medieval European cities were littered with excrement until they were crushed into new pavements by shoes, horses' hooves, and vehicles...... Now you understand why this place stinks! The pavement of the streets is paved with old stool!

Moreover, the streets of medieval cities are very narrow, and it is not easy to avoid the sudden fall of and urine from the sky without paying full attention. In 17th century Paris, France, the law stipulated that citizens were not allowed to dump feces and urine from the upper floors during the day, only at night, but before dumping, they must shout "pay attention to urine" to prevent unnecessary public security disputes...... In the more ancient medieval era, it could be dumped casually during the day and night, and whether it would squeak to remind passers-by before dumping feces and urine depended on the citizen's vegetarian and mood.

In addition to the dwellers who dump their feces and urine on the streets, some passers-by simply poop and pee on the side of the road, not to mention donkeys, horses, cats and dogs, which perpetually permeate the cities of medieval Europe.

-- In 1776, during the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin crossed the ocean to France to ask for help, but he was stupefied by the stench just after entering Paris, and the sanitary situation in Paris had already improved considerably...... So, there are a lot of people who comment causantly that if anyone could live in medieval Paris, his nose would definitely be able to withstand the gas bombs of the First World War!

If we come across a lump of shit on a modern street, we can still frown and try to get around it. However, in the streets of medieval Europe, where feces and urine are everywhere, I don't know how to make a detour.

In order to prevent their skirts from being soiled by the dung-paved streets, medieval European women learned a type of high-heeled wooden shoe that somewhat resembled modern platform shoes, but with soles that were 6 to 18 inches tall (from more than ten centimeters to nearly half a meter!). It's exaggerated enough. To walk in wooden shoes that look like stilts, it obviously requires a very high level of balance and athletic talent......

Alas, it's embarrassing enough to have to walk on stilts on the street, but it's better than wearing a long dress covered in and urine to a prom.

So, stepping on filthy feces and muddy water, beware of the feces and urine that could be splashed over your head at any moment, and smelling the terrible stench comparable to the poison gas bombs of the First World War, you finally wander around the medieval city with trepidation, and label this hellish place as dirty, ignorant, backward, hell on earth, and so on. I'm afraid that I don't even have the heart to watch the puppet show and listen to the church hymns, I just want to leave as soon as possible.

In fact, these European cities, built on dung heaps, were far from their most terrifying time in the Middle Ages.

Medieval Europe was sparsely populated, and even in the cities, the accumulation of feces was not the most pressing problem.

With the development of the times, on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, when the population of Europe's large cities had already reached hundreds of thousands, and the concept of hygiene had not improved with it, the situation was even more terrifying and absurd.

In the late Middle Ages, Parisians finally began to collect excrement and pile it up on the outside of the city walls in order to clean up the city. Unfortunately, as Paris prospered, so did its dung heaps.

Eventually, the dunghill had grown so appalling in size that the walls had to be built high for security reasons, so that the enemy could not rush directly onto the walls of Paris - God, the "dung belt around Paris" accumulated since the Middle Ages was so high that it could be submerged, and the city of Paris was a pearl surrounded and defended by dungheaps!!

Moreover, the situation has reached such a point that Parisians have to be lazy and do not think about how to pull away the mountain of dung, but directly raise the walls on the dung heap...... Do you like so much? What kind of flower is Paris! Is it a poop city at all!!

As for the British, the situation was not much better, they did build public toilets and sewers earlier, but they discharged the excrement directly into the river that flowed through the city. Then the tiny river soon began to slowly start silting up due to too much dropping......

London's Fleet River, for example, collected manure for centuries, and when the river finally stopped flowing, it became Fleet Street – such a bizarre and green way to reclaim 6 from the sea is truly breathtaking.