This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky.

Listener discretion advised.

Heinrich the 6th, the 18-year-old king of Germany and son of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbosa

sat by a window next to Conrad of Wittelsbach, the Archbishop of Mainz.

It was the evening of July 25th, 1184, and the air between the two men was tense.

By this point, Heinrich and the Archbishop had run out of things to say to one another.

Earlier when they had first sat down, the conversation had flowed freely.

Heinrich had come to Airfort to broker an agreement between the Archbishop and the landgrave Ludwig III of Thuringia.

The two of them had some heated disputes over land rights in Airfort, but by all accounts, each had come to the negotiations willingly and with high hopes for a quick resolution. Heinrich, the

king of Germany, had assembled a Hoftag, an unofficial meeting attended by his court, as well as

the local nobility and clergy, to settle the matter once and for all. But by this point, however, Heinrich and the Archbishop

were not talking about land, titles, or anything at all. The meeting had long since crumbled,

so too, quite literally, had the building around them, save for the window alcove where the two men

had been sitting. Now Heinrich and the Archbishop awaited rescue in horrified silence,

holding on for dear life after being forced to watch as their fellow nobles floundered and drowned below them

in a roiling pit of mud, debris, and human waste. I'm Dana Schwartz and this is Noble Blood.

The Airfort-Latrine disaster, as it would come to be called,

is remembered as one of medieval history's most disgusting calamities.

It was what it sounds like.

A building collapsed into its underground latrine cesspit, killing, injuring, or traumatizing,

the attendees of Heinrich the 6th's Hoftug. Its effects, both on the lines of noble succession

...