Cannibalism in Western Europe: An Enduring Taboo

Modern Western European history has been shaped by contrasts. Europe has often been depicted as a bastion of civilisation resisting the barbaric peoples said to inhabit the rest of the world, with cannibalism being one custom that supposedly separated Europeans from everyone else for centuries.

Although it is commonly presented as among the most brutal and disturbing practices imaginable, my recent research indicates that people in Western Europe consumed human body parts in prehistoric periods and in the centuries afterwards.

The motivations varied, from nutritional necessity to the religious and medicinal customs recorded across different eras. Medieval sources describe cannibalism as recurring during famine, warfare, social disorder and other difficult moments for communal life.

Yet another type of cannibalism attributed medicinal value to particular parts of the human body.

An enduring taboo

For hundreds of years, the dismembered human body was regarded as another substance that could be used to prepare a wide variety of medicines and treatments.

Between the late Roman period and the early Middle Ages, both the Codex Theodosianus and the Visigothic Code introduced laws banning the violation of graves and tombs.

Desecrating burial places to obtain remedies made from human remains, including blood, was likewise prohibited.

From the 7th century, then, inherited legislation already controlled or penalised the treatment of tombs and human remains as supplies of curative ingredients.

The Roman and Visigothic restrictions were not Europe’s only such measures: further legal texts emerged over time. Their existence and spread reflected the continued existence of the practice they sought to prevent.

Christian penitentials

The arrival of Christianity brought Handbooks of Penance: books or collections of rules that set out sins alongside their prescribed penances. They reveal early medieval ecclesiastical efforts to regulate society, establishing what was permitted and forbidden in matters of both violence and sexuality.

The Hibernian Canons, for example, prohibited the drinking of blood or urine, punishing it with seven years of bread and water under a bishop’s oversight. Other penitentials from the late 7th century declared animals that had eaten human flesh or drunk human blood to be impure, and banned their consumption.

The era’s best-known penitential, compiled by Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury, refers twice to the ban on consuming blood or semen. It particularly addresses women who drank their husbands’ blood for supposed healing benefits. Here again, these substances appear as remedies, as they do in the Visigothic Code.

The penitential of the monastery of Monte Cassino repeats this ban. Spanish penitentials similarly punish the consumption of semen or its use as an ingredient in food.

These prohibitions were aimed especially at women and concerned the power they might acquire through male blood or menstrual blood, because of its therapeutic or magical qualities.

The need to prohibit these customs suggests that real practices existed which authorities wished to regulate and control.

Religious cannibalism?

From Christianity’s earliest days, the ambiguity surrounding its rituals produced misunderstandings. Its followers were, for instance, accused of being cannibals who consumed human sacrifices in honour of their God.

Later, certain Christians levelled this accusation at Jews in medieval Europe. Charges of cruelty were also made against other “heretics”, including the Cataphyrgians, whose eucharist was allegedly prepared by mixing children’s blood with flour.

As local saints gained importance, their miraculous powers and the accessibility of their tombs meant that, following death, their bodies were also employed in cures and remedies.

Unlike practices that were absolutely forbidden, however, contact cannibalism – consuming substances that had simply come into contact with a saint’s body or relics – was allowed.

Oil that had passed through a tomb, as well as water, dust and even stones taken from sacred burial sites, could be swallowed in pursuit of healing and the miraculous effects of these “fragments of eternity”. Consumption of the dead, or thanatophagy, thus gave way to consumption of the sacred, or hagiophagy.

Emperor Constantine’s bath of blood

The legend of Pope Saint Sylvester I curing Emperor Constantine’s leprosy illustrates Christian literature’s attempts to end these cruel, supposedly pagan customs. The story circulated across Europe through oral accounts of the saint’s miracles, as well as through paintings and sculptures.

In the tale, Emperor Constantine is afflicted severely with leprosy. Acting on his doctors’ advice, he resolves to bathe in blood obtained by killing thousands of children.

As Constantine goes to sacrifice them, however, Saint Sylvester and the children’s mothers persuade him to reject this treatment and accept baptism instead. His illness is then cured miraculously.

The legend portrays pagan beliefs as cruel and disrespectful towards the human body, while seeking to demonstrate the power of Christian faith against the loathsome superstitions that came before it.

From a possible Italian origin, the tale spread across Europe and reached the monastic texts of northern Castile in the 10th century.

Cannibals in the 19th century

During the Modern Age, and even into the 19th century, several dictionaries of materials continued to ascribe healing properties to human body parts, including fat, blood and urine. One example is José Oriol Ronquillo’s 1855 publication, itself based on a French dictionary published in 1759.

Such ideas are closely associated with Romantic literature and its assortment of vampires, werewolves and other human-like creatures with appetites for flesh and blood.

But cannibalism had been central to the cultural conflict between alleged pagan barbarism and Christianity long before the 19th century, and even before the colonisation of America or Africa.

Christianity did not entirely discard the practice. Instead, it reshaped it, looking to contact with relics, or even their consumption, as a means of both obtaining a cure and eating it.

Abel de Lorenzo Rodríguez, Visiting Researcher, LaMOP (UMR 8589), University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne & Postdoctoral Fellow, Faculty of History, Institute for Humanities Research, University of Santiago de Compostela, University of Santiago de Compostela

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