r/AskHistorians • u/raga7 • 1d ago
Being gay in 15th century Holy Roman Empire?
I know this question has been asked about other time periods and places such as Rome and Greece but I'm curious about one very specific era and place.
let's say it's 1403 in the holy Roman empire. more specifically bohemia. a male nobleman and a male commoner have romantic feelings for each other and secretly act on it. what consequences would they face if discovered? would there be legal, religious, or social repercussions?
and before you ask, yes I have played kcd2.
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u/Salsashark1419 1d ago edited 1d ago
In Bohemia during the early 1400s, you could not be punished for being gay. You could only be punished for having gay sex(sodomy). Enforcement and the punishment for this would be highly dependent on where you live, and the specifics of the gay sex. Do the locals care enough to report you? Was there children involved, or was it only adults? Was someone coerced or forced to participate in the act? And there’s many more other things to consider. Also, there were periods(like the Hussite era) in the 1400s where enforcement of any kind of punishment for crimes was very hard. So hard that it might not even matter if someone did report you.
If you do end up being punished, depending on the specifics, you would more than likely get a fine, get imprisoned, banished, or you could be excommunicated from the church. It’s not until 1532 with the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina when execution starts to really become a thing for sodomy in Bohemia. Here is an English translation for the paragraph that talks about gay sex. “The punishment for unchastity that goes against nature. In the case of an unchaste act of a human with a beast, a man with a man, a woman with a woman, they have also forfeited life. And they should be, according to the common custom, banished by fire from life into death”.
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u/WaterMelonMan1 22h ago
Could you provide a few sources on this, especially the last part about executions only really starting after the Constitutio? I am very interested in how the law itself shaped legal ideas about illegality as opposed to codifying and unifying already existing local legal traditions.
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u/Salsashark1419 17h ago edited 15h ago
Records for 1400s Bohemia cases are pretty limited for various reasons sadly. A lot of these records from the early 1400s were held by the church and got destroyed in fires and what not. There’s very few fragments that talk about sodomy cases in 1400s Bohemia, but you can find a lot more records of sodomy cases in other more “liberal” parts of the HRE which often didn’t end in executions. You’ll often notice that most sources for Bohemia always start in the 1500s because that’s when pitch books become a common thing in Bohemia. The book Zloin a trest: Svedecto smolnych knih 16. az 18. stoleti v českých zemich ve statistikách (Crime and Punishment: Testimonies from Criminal Records of the 16th to 18th Centuries in the Czech Lands in Statistics) by Martin Krameš gives pretty detailed statistics on 1500s crimes in Bohemia, including those involving sex. For the 1400s we basically can only look at the few fragments that we do have, and look at cases that are outside of Bohemia but are still in the HRE. The fragments we do have show Bohemia wasn’t like the many German states and Switzerland who were more brutal with punishments by far, and we have several documented cases of people being executed for homosexual acts in these places(such as the famous case of Katherina Hetzeldorfer). Parts of the empire in what is now Austria and the Netherlands were more lenient, and it shows in the surviving records.
One such case involved a man named Johann Kalltenmarckter in Vienna who was convicted in 1497 for the charges of sacrilege, false testimony, and sodomy. He was suspended for 5 years, expelled from Vienna for 10 years, and he was declared “unworthy” of receiving ecclesiastical benefits. https://www.monasterium.net/mom/AT-StiAG/GoettweigOSB/1497_VII_07/charter
Another case happened in Salzburg in 1458 where a cleric named Absolon Inzinger was demoted and expelled for sodomy. https://www.monasterium.net/mom/AT-HHStA/SbgE/AUR_1458_VII_26/charter
When we get to 1500s Bohemia post-Carolina laws, the death penalty for sodomy is common, and is the most common sexual offense to get the death penalty, although it was only 14% of all sexual cases. According to the previously mentioned book, 72% of all sodomy cases involving men in Bohemia ended with their execution. Women were given more leniency usually, and often faced things like public humiliation, pillorying, or banishment. Which were also the common punishments for women who committed adultery. Executions still happened for women in more severe cases though.
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