Medieval Queens Were Far More DISGUSTING Than You Think

PART 2:

 A grand ball at Windsor Castle. Hundreds of nobles dancing, laughing. Every smile revealing rows of deliberately blackened teeth. The smell of decay mixing with heavy perfume. One Italian ambassador wrote home saying, “The English court smells like a graveyard covered in roses. And that perfume, it wasn’t just for pleasure.

 It was essential because these weren’t the only smells that needed covering. We need to talk about something medieval historians usually avoid. What happened during that time of the month? Royal women had to manage their periods with whatever was available. And what was available was horrifying. They used rags, not clean sterile pads, old linen strips that would be rinsed in cold water and reused month after month, year after year, the same cloths.

 But here’s the truly shocking part. They often wash these rags in urine. Stale urine was the medieval equivalent of detergent. They’d collect chamber pot contents, let it sit until it turned to ammonia, then use it as cleaning solution. So, these menstrual rags were washed in old piss, dried, and then placed against the most sensitive parts of their bodies.

 A German princess’s diary from 1456 describes the smell during court gatherings when multiple ladies were menstruating. She writes, “The great hall filled with such odor that the Duke ordered all windows open despite the winter frost.” Some women tried alternatives. They’d stuff moss into cloth pouches.

 Spagnum moss, which actually has antiseptic properties, but they didn’t know that. They just knew it absorbed blood. The same moss might be used for months growing bacteria, never properly cleaned. And remember, these women weren’t bathing during their periods either. Medieval medicine taught that immersing a menstruating woman in water could kill her by blocking the flow.

 So for one week every month, these queens added another layer of uncleanliness to their already unwashed bodies. Which brings us to the creatures that made their homes on these unwashed bodies. Every single queen, princess, and duchess in medieval Europe had lice. Not might have, definitely had. It was so common that delousing time was built into the daily schedule. Picture this.

Every morning, noble ladies would sit while servants went through their hair with fine-tuned combs, picking out lice and eggs. They’d collect them on a special cloth, the lice cloth, which would then be burned. This took hours every single day. Queen Isabau of Bavaria once had such a severe infestation that she had to cut off all her hair.

 The court physician counted over a thousand lice in just one small section before giving up. But here’s what makes it worse. Some thought lice were generated spontaneously from dirt. They believed if you were unclean enough, lice would just appear from your skin. So when holy women like St. Margaret of Hungary refused to wash her hair and became infested with lice, she saw it as proof of her devotion.

 The lice were sent by God to test her. She’d sit in prayer while lice crawled across her face. Considering each bite a blessing, the fleas were even worse than the lice. Palaces were infested. The rushcovered floors were breeding grounds. One account from Hampton Court describes watching the floor literally moving from all the fleas jumping.

 Royal women carried flea traps, small tubes filled with honey or blood that they’d wear under their dresses to attract fleas away from their skin. When that didn’t work, they’d have servants follow them with special flea catching dogs whose entire purpose was to attract the parasites away from their mistresses. But nothing compared to body lice.

 These lived in the seams of clothing coming out to feed on blood. Since queens rarely wash their elaborate gowns, some of these dresses cost more than a house. The lice had permanent homes. When archaeologists opened the tomb of Queen Isabella of Araggon, they found her burial dress still crawling with dormant lice eggs.

 500 years later, they were still there waiting. And if you think that’s disgusting, wait until you hear what these women did when they actually got sick. When royal women fell ill, the treatments were worse than the diseases. suffering from headaches. The cure was to apply a pus of fresh bird droppings to your forehead.

 Not dried, not processed, fresh, warm bird [ __ ] held against the skin for hours. The warmth was thought to draw out evil humors. Skin problems. Bathe the affected area in virgin boy urine. Yes, specifically virgin boys collected fresh each morning. Royal households actually employed young boys whose only job was to provide urine for medicinal purposes.

But the worst treatments were reserved for women’s health issues. Queen Catherine of Araggon desperately wanted to conceive a male heir. The treatment, she had to sit over a pot of burning goat feces. The smoke was supposed to wake up her womb. She endured this for hours. The toxic fumes causing severe chemical burns to her most intimate areas.

 Another treatment for infertility involved inserting peseries made from crocodile dung mixed with honey. Yes, crocodile feces inside the body. These weren’t desperate peasant remedies. These were prescribed by the finest physicians in Europe to queens and princesses. When it came time for child birth, things got even worse. Royal births were grand state occasions.

 There were also death traps. When a queen went into labor, the birthing chamber was prepared according to tradition. Windows sealed, doors locked. The room kept as hot as possible cuz cold air was thought to harm the baby. No one washed their hands. Not the midwives, not the physicians, not even the women handling the newborn.

 Queen Jane Seymour, Henry VII’s third wife, died 11 days after giving birth. The cause? Almost certainly purple fever, an infection caused by unwashed hands introducing bacteria into the birth canal. Her physicians had come straight from examining corpses to deliver the future king. They didn’t know they were carrying death on their fingers.

 The instruments, if needed, were wiped on a cloth at best. The same forceps used on a woman who died of childbed fever might be used on the queen without any cleaning beyond a quick wipe. And if a queen survived childbirth but later contracted syphilis from her philandering husband, the cure was mercury.

 Liquid mercury rubbed directly onto genital sores. The saying went, “A night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury.” The Mercury caused teeth to fall out, hair to disappear, and eventually madness. Speaking of hair, let’s talk about what was living in those elaborate royal hairstyles. By the 1600s, many royal women had given up on their own hair entirely.

 They shaved their heads and wore elaborate wigs. You’d think this would be more hygienic, but you’d be wrong. The wigs were made from human hair, often bought from corpses or desperately poor women. They were styled with animal fat and flour paste to hold their shape. This combination of dead human hair, animal fat, and flour became something horrifying, a breeding ground for everything.

 Multiple accounts described servants finding mice nesting in stored wigs. The wigs on women’s heads became ecosystems. Lice, fleas, and sometimes maggots from the rotting animal fat used as styling product. Queen Christina of Sweden’s wig was so infested that when she removed it during a council meeting, witnesses saw streams of lice flowing down her shaved scalp.

 She laughed it off, saying the lice were subjects who stayed close to their queen. The wigs were rarely cleaned because washing would ruin their elaborate styles. Instead, they were refreshed with powder, usually flour mixed with white lead, so you had rotting animal fat, human hair from corpses, lead poison, and colonies of parasites.

 all sitting on top of a queen’s head. One French duchess’s wig became so infested with maggots from the rotting pade that when she leaned forward at dinner, maggots fell onto her plate. She simply had a servant brush them away and continued eating. These wigs were worn continuously for months. At night, they’d be placed on wig stands where rats would come to feed on the fat and flour.

 In the morning, the wig would be powdered again and placed back on the head, rats droppings and all. And underneath these wigs, the shaved scalps were often covered in soores from the constant irritation and infection. But that was hidden, covered by these beautiful, elaborate, absolutely revolting hair pieces. This combination of vanity and filth extended to every aspect of their beauty routines.

 Some hygiene practices weren’t just disgusting, they were literally fatal. Queen Elizabeth I’s makeup routine eventually killed her. The lead poisoning caused by decades of Siru’s application led to memory loss, abdominal pain, and eventually death. But even as she was dying, she kept applying more lead to cover the damage the lead had caused.

 Deand Poatier, mistress to the French king, went even further. She drank gold chloride solution daily because she believed it preserved youth. When her body was exumed in 2009, scientists found gold levels 500 times normal. The gold had destroyed her bones from the inside out. Maria Gunning, Countess of Coventry, died at 27 from cosmetic poisoning.

 She was so addicted to white lead makeup that she continued applying it even as her face rotted away. Toward the end, witnesses said pieces of her flesh would fall off when she smiled. To achieve that fashionable high forehead, women would remove hair using mixtures of cat feces and vinegar.

 When that didn’t work fast enough, they’d use quick lime, the same costic substance used to dissolve corpses. One lady in waiting to Queen Anne of Denmark wrote about watching the queen’s forehead blister and peel after a quick lime treatment. The skin came off in sheets. For rosy cheeks, they used vermilion mercury sulfide.

 For sparkling eyes, they dropped belladona directly into their pupils, causing hallucinations and sometimes permanent blindness. These women knew something was wrong. They could feel their skin burning, see their faces decaying, but they kept applying more poison to cover the damage caused by yesterday’s poison.

And when they weren’t poisoning themselves with cosmetics, they were poisoning themselves with their clothing. Royal women wore the same unwashed undergarments for weeks. But it’s worse than just wearing dirty clothes. The corsets were never washed ever. They couldn’t be. The materials would be ruined.

 So year after year, the same corset absorbed sweat, skin cells, and body oils. They turned yellow, then brown, then black in the areas of most contact. One inventory from the wardrobe of Mary, Queen of Scots, describes corsets so degraded they had to be burned because the smell couldn’t be removed even by the strongest perfumes. The outer gowns were even worse.

 These elaborate dresses worth more than most people’s homes were almost never cleaned. Instead, they were refreshed with perfume and smoke. Servants would hang them near fires, burning aromatic herbs, hoping the smoke would cover the stench of years of sweat. Some dresses were worn for so long that they began to rot while still being worn.

 The combination of sweat, body oils, and never being cleaned caused the fabric to literally decompose. There are accounts of silk dresses splitting apart during court functions because the material had rotted through. But the most shocking clothing practice involved poisoned garments.

 Royal women would sometimes receive gifts of beautiful dresses from rivals. These dresses were worn without washing. After all, who washes a new dress, but some were poisoned. The fabric was soaked in mercury or arsenic solutions, then dried. As the wearer sweated, the poison would be absorbed through the skin. The victim would sicken and die over weeks, never knowing their beautiful new gown was killing them.

 This became so common that some queens employed dress testers, servants who would wear new garments first to ensure they weren’t deadly. And where did all these unwashed, potentially poisoned nobles go to socialize, to spaces that were just as filthy as they were? The Palace of Versailles, the pinnacle of European luxury, was also the pinnacle of filth.

 During grand balls with thousands of guests and limited facilities, aristocratic ladies would relieve themselves in stairwells behind curtains in the corners of gilded rooms. One account describes finding human feces behind a tapestry in the queen’s own chambers, left by a duchess who couldn’t make it to a chamber pot in time.

 The smell was masked with perfume, incense, and scattered herbs. But underneath the roses and lavender was the stench of human waste that had nowhere to go. Chamber pots, even golden ones used by queens, weren’t always emptied immediately. In winter, when emptying meant going outside, pots might sit for days. The ammonia smell would burn visitors eyes.

 One Russian ambassador wrote that he could smell the side from a mile away. A combination of thousands of unwashed bodies, rotting food, human waste, and the desperate attempt to cover it all with perfume. The floors were covered in rush mats that were changed perhaps once a season. These absorbed everything, spilled wine, food, blood, urine, vomit.

 They became breeding grounds for rats and insects. Yet, queens in their finest gowns would walk across these same floors, their trains dragging through the filth. Even the throne rooms weren’t sacred. There are multiple accounts of nobles defecating behind the throne itself when court sessions ran too long. The king and queen would sit for hours pretending not to notice the smell while courtiers held perfumed handkerchiefs to their noses.

 And in the midst of all this filth, there were those who took it even further, who turned uncleanliness into a religious virtue. Some royal women took uncleanliness to holy extremes. Queen Isabella of Castile wasn’t just avoiding baths for convenience. She believed dirt brought her closer to God. During the siege of Granada, she vowed not to change her undergarments until the city fell. The siege lasted 8 months.

 When Granada finally surrendered, her shmese had turned black and had to be cut from her body. Parts of it had fused with her skin from the accumulated sweat and grime. She considered this a holy accomplishment. St. Elizabeth of Hungary, born a princess, went even further. After her husband died, she refused all hygiene as penants.

 She slept in her own waste. She welcomed disease as God’s blessing. When servants tried to clean her, she fought them off, claiming they were trying to steal her pathway to heaven. St. Margaret of Hungary viewed her lice infestation as a divine gift. She would sit in prayer while lice crawled across her face, considering each bite a blessing from God.

 When offered treatment, she refused, saying the lice were her little martyrdoms. These weren’t seen as mental breakdowns. They were celebrated as religious devotion. Other noble women would attempt to imitate them, deliberately cultivating filth as a sign of piety. And then there were those whose hygiene practices crossed from disgusting into the truly macabb countess, the blood countess of Hungary.

 The stories say she murdered over 600 young women and bathed in their blood to preserve her youth. Think about the practical reality for a moment. Human blood coagulates in minutes. It turns brown. It stinks. Anyone actually bathing in blood would be sitting in a tub of rotting, congealed matter that would cake onto the skin in thick, foul smelling layers.

 Court testimony describes servants having to scrape coagulated blood off the countess’s body with special tools. The smell in her bathing chamber was so overwhelming that servants would vomit while attending her. The blood would attract flies and vermin. It would rot within hours in the warm bath chambers.

 Yet Ba allegedly continued this practice for years, sitting in tubs of decomposing blood, convinced it was making her beautiful. Whether every detail is true or not, the fact that people believed it was plausible tells you everything about medieval hygiene. The idea of bathing in blood wasn’t seen as impossible. It was seen as extreme but understandable.

After all, if queens were already bathing in milk that they then gave to the poor to drink, painting their faces with lead until the skin fell off and sitting over burning feces for fertility, was bathing in blood really that much worse? Let me paint you one final picture of a typical day in the life of a medieval queen.

 She wakes up in sheets that haven’t been changed in months, crawling with bed bugs and fleas. Her body hasn’t seen water in weeks, maybe months. She relieves herself in a golden chamber pot that might not be emptied for days. Her ladies arrive to dress her. First, the sheme she’s worn for 2 weeks, stiff with sweat and stained with menstrual blood, washed in urine.

 Then the corset that’s never been cleaned, black with years of grime. Then the layers of dresses infested with lice and fleas. Her face is painted with lead, a fresh layer over yesterday’s poison. Her teeth are black with decay, her breath feted. Her elaborate wig, styled with animal fat and crawling with parasites, is placed on her shaved saw-covered scalp.

 She spends her day in rooms where people defecate in corners, where the floors squirm with fleas, where the air is thick with perfume trying to mask the stench of hundreds of unwashed bodies. When illness strikes, she’s treated with feces pices and mercury rubs. When she gives birth, it’s with unwashed hands reaching inside her.

 When she develops sores from the lead makeup, she covers them with more lead. This was the life of the richest, most powerful women in Europe. They had access to clean water, to soap, to fresh clothing. They had armies of servants. They could have been clean. They chose not to be. They chose superstition over sanitation, fashion over health, appearance over reality.

They literally preferred death to cleanliness. Queen Elizabeth I died with her face rotted by lead. Queen Jane Seymour died from infected childbirth. Countless queens died from mercury treatments for syphilis. They died young, they died painfully, and they died filthy. The golden age of European royalty was actually the age of gold covering rot, of jewels decorating disease, of crowns sitting on liceinfested heads.

 The next time you see a portrait of a medieval queen in all her finery, remember what those paintings don’t show. remember what was crawling under those gowns, rotting behind that makeup, and festering beneath those jewels. The past wasn’t just different. It was disgusting. And these queens, these paragonss of feminine beauty and power were some of the filthiest human beings who ever lived.

 Not because they had to be, but because they chose to be. And somewhere in a palace, another noble lady is painting her teeth black to look more like a queen, never questioning why mimicking decay became the height of fashion. And if you think these royal women suffered from their toxic hygiene, wait until you hear about the Spanish king whose body was so deformed that his teenage bride soiled herself in terror on their wedding night.

 Watch the king whose bride soiled herself on their wedding night.