so apparently in 815 CE there was a common belief that sky pirates sailed ships in the clouds and (working in collaberation with frankish weather wizards) stole all the crops that got damaged in storms and took them back to the cloud realm of magonia.
And this was apparently a common enough belief that an archbishop felt the need to write a treatise to debunk it and insist that only god controls the weather, which is the only reason we know about it.
there are three important points to take from this, i think
- This is great inspiration for your next dnd game
- Tropes that might seem relatively modern (like airship pirates) can often actually go WAY back
- The stuff your average medieval christian actually believed in will often have very little resemblance to christianity. And thats before you even get to the proper heretics.
EDIT: people keep asking for the source and its now been added multiple times in different reblog chains. I should have put it in the original post but i am a fool: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/Agobard-OnHailandThunder.asp
...this reminds me of my boy Eilmer of Malmesbury, aka Eilmer the Amazing Flying Monk.
Eilmer was an 11th-century Benedictine monk at Malmesbury Abbey (Wiltshire, England), a monastery renowned for its scholarly tradition. (It most notably produced the historian William of Malmesbury, who decided to put this story in his Gesta Regum Anglorum, or Lives of English Kings, even though it has nothing to do with the lives of English kings. This is presumably because William also looked at it and went, "well obviously I have to write about THAT.")
Eilmer decided that he was going to be the first man to fly! (Yes, fly.) This was inspired by him reading the Greek myths of Daedaelus and Icarus, which you would think would be the exact reason NOT to do this, but Eilmer was not going to be deterred by any dadgum cautionary tales! So he built a pair of homemade wings and leapt off the roof of the abbey. No word on whether it was in the middle of the night and caused everyone to have a heart attack when he hit the ground, which he obviously did (though allegedly, not before soaring gracefully through the air for almost 200 meters /600 feet and then crashing in a nearby alley). Unfortunately for the pioneers of manned spaceflight everywhere, Eilmer then broke both his legs and was lame for the rest of his life, which you would think would have deterred him from trying this again. It did not!
Because he was a scientist, god damn it, and he needed to control for proper variables, Eilmer took more observations of birds, decided that he had obviously crashed because he did not have a tail, and built himself one. He then added it to the original wing apparatus and somehow got up to the roof of the monastery again (I like to imagine him waving his crutches and being like GET OUT OF THE WAY, GOT SCIENCE TO DO!) at which point the abbot caught up to him and was like NO. NO, EILMER, WE ARE NOT GOING TO DO THIS AGAIN. GET DOWN FROM THERE RIGHT NOW.
And alas, that was the end of the career of Eilmer, the Eleventh-Century Aviator (as one delightfully-titled article calls him). However, this story was told and retold by medieval intellectuals and contributed to designs and speculations on human-powered flying apparatuses throughout the Middle Ages and early modern era. So honestly, I would say it was a success. Plus, he lived long enough to see Halley's comet at the age of about 5 in 989, and then again in 1066, just prior to the Battle of Hastings.
Primary source: William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum/Lives of the English Kings, ed. and trans. Rodney M. Thomson and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
Secondary sources: James Paz, ‘Human Flight in Early Medieval England: Reality, Reliability, and Mythmaking (Of Science and Fiction)’, New Medieval Literatures 15 (2013), 1-28. Doi: 10.1484/J.NML.5.103448
Lynn White, "Eilmer of Malmesbury, an Eleventh Century Aviator: A Case Study of Technological Innovation, Its Context and Tradition," Technology and Culture 2 (1961), 97–111. doi:10.2307/3101411. JSTOR 3101411.
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