10 Medieval Tombs Sealed for Reasons That Still Terrify Historians

10. The Prittlewell Prince. Essex, England. Around the year 580. Behind a pub. That is where the deadliest secret in early medieval Britain was found. Behind a pub, next to a busy supermarket on a patch of weeds the local council wanted to flatten for a wider road. October 2003. A team from the Museum of London Archaeology arrives expecting nothing. Earlier surveys in the area had turned up scraps. Some Anglo-Saxon graves, maybe a few pottery shards. Routine. The archaeologists drove down from London, pulled into the lay-by behind the Priory Crown pub on Priory Crescent, and started digging in the grass verge between the road and the football pitch. What they found, stop traffic in the most literal sense, the road widening scheme was abandoned. The plot was cordoned off, the entire archaeological community of Britain held its breath. Because five feet beneath the pub car park, sealed under 1,400 years of Essex clay, lay a perfectly preserved royal burial chamber, untouched, unrobbed, unsuspected. A room the size of a small bedroom, 4m by 4m, walled in oak planks that had long since rotted to ghosts. And in that room lay down exactly as the mourners had left him in the late 500s, the Priddlewell Prince. Except there was no prince. That is the part nobody is ready for. The chamber held a folding stool inlaid with iron. It held a Byzantine flagon from Syria, hammered out of copper alloy, 5,000 miles from where it ended up. It held a lyre carved from maple, the wood reduced to a dark stain in the shape of a stringed instrument. It held drinking horns, hanging bowls, glass vessels in pale blue and green, a sword in a wooden scabbard, an iron bound bucket, and a gold belt buckle of such fine workmanship that conservators initially refused to believe it was 6th century work at all. They thought it had to be a hoax. It wasn't. It was the real thing, and it was royal, and it was buried with someone the East Saxons had loved enough to send into eternity with a king's ransom and foreign goods. But the body was gone. Not stolen, not removed, not missing in the way grave robbers leave a tomb missing. Just gone. Dissolved. The acidic Essex soil had eaten every bone, every tooth, every fragment of cartilage and flesh, all twelve stone of him, gone. What remained was a man-shaped absence, a darker stain in the soil where his body had once lain, surrounded by the riches he was meant to take with him into the afterlife. Forty experts spent fifteen years analyzing the chamber. From the position of clothing buckles and the spacing of the garter clasps, they worked out he had been five feet eight inches tall. From a few fragments of tooth enamel, the only trace of him that survived, they worked out he had been older than six and probably an adolescent or young man. From the layout of his possessions, they worked out where his head had been, and where his feet had been, and where his hands had crossed over his stomach. And then, on the patch of soil where his face had once been, they found two small foil crosses made of beaten gold. One had been laid over each closed eye. This is the part of the story that rewrites a history book. Gold crosses placed over the eyes of a dead king. The deliberate ceremonial mark of a Christian burial, and the dating of the chamber, refined through radiocarbon and coin evidence, now places the burial somewhere around the year 580, or possibly slightly later. That is decades before St. Augustine of Canterbury landed in Kent in 597 to begin the official conversion of the Anglo-Saxons. Decades before the missionary push from Rome. Decades before the kings of southern England were supposed to have heard the Christian message at all. And yet here in Essex, behind what would one day be a pub, an Anglo-Saxon prince was being lowered into a chamber with gold crosses pressed gently onto the bones of his face. Somebody had got there first. Somebody had reached the East Saxon royal house with the new religion before Rome did. And the church has no record of who, or how, or when. The Priddlewell prince has no name, he has no surviving bones, he has no relics, no skull, no portrait. He has only the shadow he left in the dirt and the gold he was meant to keep forever. And the chamber was sealed deliberately packed with grave goods that would be ruinous to disturb, hidden under a mound that erosion eventually flattened to invisibility. Whoever sealed him in, wanted him to stay sealed. And for 1,400 years, behind a pub on the edge of the North Sea, he did. Number 9. The missing tomb of Khwarazmshah Mohammed II. December 1220. A small, freezing island in the Caspian Sea, somewhere near the port of Abaskan. The wind comes off the water in horizontal sheets. There is nothing on this island. A few fishing huts, a handful of trees bent sideways from years of weather, and a man dying of pleurisy in a borrowed bed, coughing blood into a rag, who, eighteen months earlier, had ruled an empire stretching from the Aral Sea to the Persian Gulf. Allah ad-Din Mohammed II, Shah of Khwarem, the most powerful Muslim ruler east of Baghdad. By the time the Mongol invasion was over, he was buried in a stolen shirt. Let's rewind. In 1217, Mohammed commanded an army of 400,000 men. He had crushed the Ghurids, broken the Karakatai, sacked the Western Karakhanids, and made vassals of every Atabeg from Azerbaijan to the Hindu Kush. He sat in the Great Palace at Urgench, wearing silk woven by craftsmen in Samarkand and eating off plates that had been carried in caravans across the Silk Road. He demanded that the Caliph in Baghdad recognize him as the supreme authority of Islam. When the Caliph refused, Mohammed began marching toward Baghdad with the intention of removing him. A snowstorm in the Zagros Mountains killed enough of his army to force him back. The world watched a man who could reasonably believe that nobody on earth could stop him. Then he made one decision. In 1218, Genghis Khan sent a trade caravan to Khwarezm, 450 merchants, Mongols, Persians, Muslims, traders bearing silver, ivory, jade. They reached the city of Otrar on the Khwarezmian border. The governor, a man named Inalchuk, accused them of being spies, seized their goods, and executed every man in the caravan except one, who escaped to carry the news back to Genghis. Genghis sent three envoys to demand Inalchuk be handed over for punishment. Mohammed executed one of the envoys and sent the other two back with their beards shaved off. The supreme insult to a Mongol nobleman. That was the moment Khwarezm ended. In 1219, Genghis crossed the Jaxarts with somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 horsemen. What followed was not a war, it was a deletion. Otrar held for five months and was leveled. The governor who had executed the caravan, Inalchuk, was captured alive and executed by having molten silver poured into his eyes and mouth. Bukhara surrendered and was burned. Samarkand, Mohammed's military capital, the supposedly impregnable city behind the Zarafshan river, surrendered in ten days. The Mongols separated the artisans, the craftsmen, the women and the children into separate groups, then killed everyone else in the city methodically by quota, working through the population like a butcher works through a carcass. Berjinch, Mohammed's capital, took seven months to fall and was so completely destroyed that the Mongols diverted the Amu Darya river through its ruins to wash away the foundations. And while his empire was being unmade behind him, Mohammed ran. He ran across the Karakum desert, he ran across the Iranian plateau, he ran through Khorasan, ditching escort after escort, sleeping in farmhouses, hiding in monasteries, never staying anywhere for more than a single night. Because the Mongol pursuit force under Jibi and Subutai was eating ground at 80 miles a day and Mohammed could feel them coming. Two of his sons died in the flight. His harem was scattered, his treasury was lost, his robes wore out, were replaced with peasant cloth, wore out again. By the time he reached the Caspian coast in late 1220, he was a frightened sick man traveling with four or five servants, no money, no army and a deep cough that had begun rattling in his chest somewhere north of the Elbers mountains. He found a fisherman willing to row him out to a small island off of Baskin. Fluoresce is what they called it then. Probably bacterial pneumonia, maybe tuberculosis. Whatever it was, on that island, on that bed, the man who had ruled from the Aral Sea to the Persian Gulf coughed his last with no doctor, no priest, no scribe, and no shroud. His sons, Jalal ad-Din and the others, who had reached the island with him, had nothing to bury their father in. They had no coffin, no oils, no incense, no winding sheet. Sources say they took a shirt from one of the few servants who had stayed loyal and used it as his burial cloth. Some say they tore strips from their own clothes to wrap his body. They dug a hole somewhere on the island, lowered him in, said the prayers they could remember, and covered him over with sand and stones. And then they left, because the Mongols were already searching the coast for them, and to be caught at their father's graveside meant death. The tomb has never been found. For 800 years, scholars and treasure hunters and Soviet archaeologists and post-Soviet Iranian teens have walked the islands off the Iranian Caspian coast looking for the burial place of the Shah of Khwarezm. There is no marker. There is no inscription. The island itself may have been swallowed by changing water levels. The wind has buried him deeper every year. Muhammad II sat on a throne that stretched from the steppes to the sea. He was buried in a borrowed shirt, and the empire that should have built him a monument was rubble before the dirt was thrown over his face. The lesson medieval kings refused to learn is the lesson he became. Sometimes the tomb is sealed because there isn't enough left of the world to remember where it is. Number 8. The Tomb of Theodoric the Great, Ravenna, Italy, 526. Stop. Before we go any further and look at a number. 230. That is how many tons a single piece of stone weighs that sits, balanced like a coin on a finger, on top of the mausoleum of Theodoric the Great. 270 tons. Quarried in one piece from the Istrian peninsula, 50 miles away, across the head of the Adriatic, somehow shipped across the water, somehow dragged inland, somehow lifted into the air, and sat down perfectly level on the rim of a two-story decagonal stone tower. Nobody knows how it was done. Nobody knows what they used. The cranes of the period could not handle it. The ropes of the period could not handle it. The ramps of the period could not handle it. And yet there it sits, 1,500 years after they put it there. A single shallow dome of Istrian limestone, 10 meters across, more than a meter thick, with twelve great stone spurs around its rim, each one carved with the name of one of the apostles. It is one of the largest monolithic domes in the ancient world. It is older than the Hagia Sophia. It is older than most of the buildings you have ever heard of. And it was built to house a body that the Byzantines threw out 14 years after Theodoric was buried beneath it. Theodoric was an Ostrogoth. His people had ridden out of the steppes two generations earlier. He had grown up as a hostage in Constantinople, learning Greek and Latin, learning the architecture of Roman cities, learning how an empire was administered. He went back west and carved out a kingdom in Italy in 493 by murdering the previous king, Odoacer, with his own hand at a peace banquet, splitting him from collarbone to hip with a single blow of his sword. Then he ruled Italy for 33 years from the same palaces the Roman emperors had used, kept the Roman senate functioning, employed Boethius and Cassiodorus, maintained the aqueducts, repaired the roads, and built, around 520, the strangest tomb in Europe. He was an Arian Christian. His subjects were Catholics. The dome of his tomb is carved with the names of the Twelve Apostles in Latin, a deliberate signal that he understood Christianity even though he interpreted it differently from the Pope in Rome. It is a building designed to argue theologically with the people who would eventually destroy it. Inside, in the upper chamber, sat a porphyry sarcophagus shaped like a Roman bathtub, deep red, polished, carved with four iron rings that the pallbearers had used to lift it into place. Theodoric was laid in that sarcophagus in 526, dressed in royal regalia, the king of the Ostrogoths, and the de facto ruler of Italy. And then the world turned. In 535, the Byzantine emperor Justinian launched a war to reclaim Italy from the Goths. His general Belisarius fought his way up the peninsula, taking Naples, taking Rome, finally taking Ravenna in 540. The Ostrogothic kingdom was finished. The Catholic Byzantine reconquerors had no interest in preserving the body of a heretic king. They opened the mausoleum, lifted Theodoric out of his porphyry tub, and, according to the chroniclers, scattered his bones. Where they went, nobody knows. Into the dirt outside the building? Into the river. Into the lime kiln. The man whose engineers had moved a 230 ton stone became, in death, less than dust. The mausoleum itself was scrubbed of its Aryan markings, rededicated to the Virgin Mary, and turned into a Christian oratory, a small chapel, under the gigantic dome. The empty porphyry sarcophagus was carried outside and left in a garden for centuries. Used variously as a flower bed, a horse trough, and a place where local children played. It was only returned to its rightful place inside the mausoleum in the 19th century. Today you can walk into Theodoric's tomb. The chamber is bare, the bathtub is empty, the dome above your head is cracked, a great jagged fissure running from one edge nearly to the center, scarring the stone, but not somehow, splitting it. Nobody is sure when the crack happened. Some say lightning, some say earthquake, some say it was simply the slow stress of an impossible weight on an impossible structure, the building finally registering after a thousand years the magnitude of what it was being asked to hold. Stand under it and listen to the silence. There is a man missing from this room, and the room has been waiting for him to come back for fourteen centuries. Number 7. John Wycliffe. 1428, a churchyard in Lutterworth, a small market town in Leicestershire. The bishop is here in person, so are the clergy of the diocese, the constables, a couple of nervous workmen with spades, and a watching crowd that has heard the rumors and turned out to see if the church really will go through with what the pope has ordered. The order is simple, dig up John Wycliffe, burn what's left of him, throw his ashes into the river. He has been dead for 44 years. The bishop of Lincoln, Richard Fleming, stands at the edge of the grave with the papal letter in his hand. The men begin to dig. This is what 44 years of fear of one man's words looks like when you can finally take a shovel to him. John Wycliffe died on the 31st of December 1384 of a stroke in the rectory at Lutterworth where he had been parish priest. He died in his bed. He died officially in communion with the Catholic Church, never formally excommunicated in his lifetime, buried in consecrated ground in the parish churchyard like any other priest. What he had done in his 60 odd years on earth, however, was unforgivable. He had argued that the church had no business owning property. He had argued that bishops and the pope had no spiritual authority that ordinary clergy did not. He had argued that the bread and wine of the Eucharist did not literally become the body and blood of Christ. He had argued, above all, that the Bible should be available to every English Christian in English. And around 1382 or 1383, with the help of his followers, that is exactly what he produced, the first complete English translation of the Vulgate. Handwritten, painstakingly copied, smuggled from parish to parish, lent and lent again until the pages fell apart. His followers, the Lollards, kept on copying it after his death. Every literate English peasant, every literate craftsman, every literate clerk who got hold of a Wycliffe-like Bible became a quiet, slow problem for the institutional church. In 1415, the Council of Constance, the same council that burned the Czech reformer Jan Hus, alive in front of a cheering crowd, turned its attention to Wycliffe. He had been dead 31 years. They condemned him on 260 separate charges. They ordered his books burned. They ordered his bones removed from consecrated ground. And then nothing happened for 13 years. The English bishops dragged their feet. Wycliffe had been a popular man in Lutterworth. He had said mass for his parishioners. He had baptized their children. The thought of digging him up and burning him seemed grotesque even to clergy who agreed with the condemnation. So the bones sat in the ground, undisturbed, while the Lollards continued to copy his Bible and the panic in Rome grew louder. Finally, in 1428, Pope Martin V personally insisted Bishop Fleming travelled from Lincoln to Lutterworth with a written order and a working party. They found the grave. They lifted the coffin. They opened it. Whether what they found was Wycliffe or whether 44 years of damp Leicestershire clay had left them with somebody else entirely, nobody knows for sure. The bones were carried out of the churchyard, piled on a fire, and burned to ash. Then the ashes were carried in a sack down to the bank of the River Swift, the little stream that runs through Lutterworth, and tipped into the current. The Pope's order was carried out. Wycliffe was removed from consecrated ground, removed from the earth, removed from physical existence. And here is the line that the church never lived down. The chronicler Thomas Fuller, writing 200 years later, said it best when he described what happened next. The Swift, he wrote, carried the ashes into the Avon, the Avon into the Severn, the Severn into the sea, and the sea carried them into the wider ocean, and the ocean to every shore. Wycliffe's ashes, scattered by the men sent to destroy him, were carried by water into every land. They were the seed that took root as the Reformation a century later. Martin Luther read Wycliffe. Jan Hus had already died for reading Wycliffe. William Tyndale, the man who would translate the New Testament into English, a hundred years after Wycliffe's bones went into the river, knew exactly whose work he was finishing. The tomb at Lutterworth is empty. The grave was filled in. There is nothing there to visit. But the River Swift still runs past the churchyard, and in 1428, the most dangerous man the medieval church ever buried left it in the sack of ash, and went everywhere. Sealing the tomb didn't work. Burning the bones didn't work. Throwing the ashes in the river didn't work. The reason they sealed him was the reason they should have left him alone. He was already free of his body. He was words on paper, and paper is harder to drown than bone. Number 6. The Crusader Emperor in his armor. Palermo, 1781. A team of antiquarians under the direction of a scholar named Francesco Daniele has gathered in the Cathedral of Palermo holding candles, holding crowbars, holding their breath. In front of them is a sarcophagus of red porphyry resting on the backs of four stone lions. Inside it lies a man who has been dead for 531 years. They are about to do something nobody has done since 1250. They are about to open the tomb of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Sicily, King of Jerusalem. The man is contemporary is called Stuper Mundi, the wonder of the world. The lid is heavy. It takes six men working with iron levers and prayer the better part of an hour to slide it back. When it finally moves, when the candlelight finally falls into the interior of the sarcophagus, what they see by the trembling yellow light does not look like what 530 years should look like. It looks like a sleeping man. Frederick is fully clothed. His skin is dark and dried but his face is recognizable. His hands are crossed over his stomach. His right hand still bears a heavy gold ring set with a single emerald the size of a walnut. On his head is a crown of gilded silver inlaid with pearls and uncut gemstones. At his side lies his sword. At his neck rests the imperial globe of the Holy Roman Empire. And the robes. Layer upon layer of silk embroidered, embellished, fastened with gold buckles, the colors faded but the pattern still visible. The outermost robe is a deep red silk and across its surface repeated in flowing calligraphic loops is Arabic script. Quranic blessings. Praises to God. The robe of a Holy Roman Emperor, the highest ranking Christian monarch in 13th century Europe embroidered in the sacred language of Islam. Daniel's hand shook so badly he could barely take notes. Frederick II had been the most unusual man on a European throne in a thousand years. Born in Sicily to a Norman mother and a German Hohenstaufen father. Raised in Palermo, when Palermo was the multicultural capital of the Mediterranean. He grew up speaking six languages including Arabic. He kept Muslim scholars at his court. He kept a harem. He wrote a treatise on falconry that mathematicians and naturalists still cite today. He led the sixth crusade in 1228 and got Jerusalem back not by fighting for it but by negotiating with the Sultan al-Kamil in fluent Arabic over course of weeks of polite discussion. The Pope excommunicated him four times. He died in 1250 in Apulia of Dysentery having spent the last decade of his life at war with the papacy. His body was carried to Palermo and laid in the red porphyry sarcophagus he had inherited from his Norman grandfather Roger II. And inside that tomb in 1781 the candlelight revealed not the corpse of a fanatic Catholic crusader but the body of a Mediterranean polymath buried as he had lived in robes that spoke Arabic, with a sword from the west and a culture from the east folded together on his chest. There was also, Daniel noted with a shock, more than one body in the sarcophagus. There were two other corpses with Frederick. One was probably his son. The identity of the third has never been fully resolved. Daniel's team did not know what to do. They had not expected the body to be intact. They had expected bones. They had expected dust. What they had was an emperor, perfectly preserved by the dry interior of the porphyry and the silk that wrapped him, looking up at them as if any moment he might open his eyes. They sketched. They wrote descriptions. They took the gold ring from his finger to study it. And they took some of the embroidered fabric for analysis. And then, perhaps because they recognized that they had no business gawking at something this strange for any longer, they sealed the tomb. Again, the lid was lowered. The porphyry was closed. Frederick II went back into the dark, slightly poorer in jewelry, slightly more famous in scholarly circles, otherwise unchanged. In 1994, Modern Conservators conducted an endoscopic examination through a small port drilled in the side of the tomb. They expected to find Frederick exactly as Daniel had described him. They did not. The robes were gone. The crown was gone. The sword was gone. The imperial globe was gone. The body was wrapped in rags and packed with straw in tow. The cheap embalming materials used to bulk out a stripped corpse. Somewhere between 1781 and 1994, in the dark of the cathedral, somebody had opened the tomb a second time. Somebody had taken the robes that had been folded over Frederick's chest for 530 years. The robes embroidered with Arabic. The robes that had no business being on a Christian emperor in the first place. Somebody had walked out of Palermo Cathedral with the most extraordinary artifacts of medieval Mediterranean culture stuffed inside their coat. The thieves have never been identified. The fabric has never been recovered. Frederick is in there still, naked under the straw, his crown long gone, his strangeness reduced to rags. Stupermundi indeed. Number 5. Sutton Hoo, the body that wasn't there. Suffolk, England, summer 1939. A self-taught archaeologist named Basil Brown is working alone in a meadow on the estate of a widow named Edith Pretty. Brushing dirt off something he has just realized is an iron rivet. He brushes a little further, there is another rivet, and another. They run in a curve. He follows the curve. The curve becomes a line. The line becomes a shape. And the shape, by the time he has uncovered enough of it to be sure of what he is looking at, is the outline of an 88 foot ship buried under the soil, lying in a long pit that nobody has touched since the early 7th century. There is no wood. The Suffolk soil is acidic. Acidic enough to dissolve oak planks, dissolve textiles, dissolve flesh, dissolve bone. Every piece of organic material in the ship has been eaten by the chemistry of the ground. What remains is a ghost. An impression. The wood has rotted away, but the soil that pressed against the wood has set into the shape of the wood, like a plaster cast of an object that no longer exists. The iron rivets are still in place, holding nothing together, suspended in the dirt at the positions where the planks used to meet. Basil Brown has found the largest Anglo-Saxon ship ever discovered, and the strangest thing about it is that what it was carrying has also vanished. In the center of the ship, where a burial chamber had been built around an unknown person of royal rank, the archaeologists found one of the richest hoards of treasure in European history. A helmet of iron and bronze, faceplate inlaid with garnets, the mask of the king with a stylized dragon over the brow, shoulder clasps of gold, and garnet that took the breath away. A purse lid worked in cloisonne, holding 37 gold coins from Frankish Gaul. A great gold belt buckle weighing more than a pound. A pattern welded sword, silver bowls from Byzantium, drinking horns, a wet stone scepter carved with the faces of human warriors. And in the center of it all, where the body should have been, where 88 feet of ship and 1400 years of Suffolk weather should have presented them with at least a skeleton, there was nothing. A human-shaped emptiness. A void. The archaeologists checked and rechecked. They sifted the soil where the body should have lain. They tested the chemistry. They found no bone, no tooth, not even a fragment of the kind of mineral residue that usually survives even in acidic ground. For a generation, scholars debated whether Sutton Hoo had even been a grave at all. Maybe it was a cenotaph, a monument to a body that had been buried elsewhere or lost at sea. Maybe the ship had been a ceremonial offering with no occupant. Maybe the king it commemorated had drowned, his body never recovered, the treasure laid in his place as a substitute soul. Then, in the 1960s and 70s, a second wave of excavation re-examined the soil under the burial chamber with newer chemical techniques. They detected phosphate residue. Specifically, the phosphate signature left behind when a human body decomposes. There had been a body. The acidic soil had simply been thorough enough to leave no trace except chemistry. Whoever he was, he had been laid out on his back in the center of his ship, dressed in his finest clothes, surrounded by his treasure with the sword at his side and the helmet near his head, and then sealed under a mound of earth that the locals knew as one of the burial mounds at Sutton Hoo and had walked past for twelve centuries without ever knowing what was inside. The leading guess for his identity is Radewald, king of the East Angles who died around 624. The dates fit. The wealth fits. The mixture of Christian and pagan items in the grave fits a man whose conversion was famously ambivalent. Bede records that Radewald kept a Christian altar and a pagan altar side by side in the same temple, hedging his bets on which god would actually turn up. But there is no proof, there is no inscription, there is only a treasure and a void and the rivets of a vanished ship. Sutton Hoo is the tomb that erased its own occupant while preserving everything around him. The earth that ate him had no taste for his gold. He went into the ground in 624, the king of his people. He came out of the ground in 1939, a perfect human-shaped absence at the center of the richest grave goods in Britain. The mound was sealed because they wanted him to take his treasure with him into the afterlife. The soil decided to let him keep the journey and skip the body. Number 4. The Sealed Tomb of Empress Wu Zetian. Qianling, China. Around 706, there are eighteen imperial Tang tombs scattered across the central plain of Shaanxi province. Seventeen of have been broken into, the eighteenth has not, and most of the people who tried, died trying. This is the tomb that the modern Chinese government will not open. Wu Zetian was the only woman in 2,000 years of Chinese imperial history to rule in her own name as emperor. Not emperor's consort, not regent, or a young son, but Huangdi, the title that the men used. She started as a low-ranking concubine of Emperor Taizong, became the favorite consort of his son Emperor Gaozong, maneuvered her way into being empress, allegedly murdered her own infant daughter, and blamed it on a rival, took over the running of the government when Gaozong's health failed, and finally, in 690, deposed her own son and declared herself the founder of a new dynasty, the Zhou. She ruled for fifteen years before age in a palace coup forced her abdication in 705. She died the next year aged 81, the most ruthless and effective politician of her age. And she was buried, against the convention that an empress should have her own monument, in the same mountain tomb as her husband Gaozong. The mausoleum is carved into the heart of Mount Liang, northwest of the city of Xi'an. A 200-foot tunnel drives into the rock, lined with stone and sealed with iron, leading to a series of subterranean chambers nobody has ever entered. Around the outside, on the broad plateau that approaches the tomb, stand 124 stone statues, four envoys, with their heads broken off, lions, ostriches, winged horses, and two great stele, one inscribed with Wu Zetian's record of her husband's reign, and one famously left completely blank, the wordless stele, the blank stone with which the only female emperor of China told the future that she had done so much, her achievements could not be reduced to words, or that her crimes were too great to be inscribed, or, depending on the interpreter, that she did not care what posterity wrote, and would leave it to them. And below ground, in chambers that have been intact since 1700, are the remains of two Tang emperors, and possibly the lost original of the Lantian Jizhou, the most famous calligraphic work in Chinese history, the Orchid Pavilion Preface by Wang Jizhou, which legend says was buried with Wu Zetian. The history of failed attempts to open the tomb reads like a horror story. During the late Tang, the warlord Huang Chao mobilized 400,000 soldiers to dig through Mount Liang. They cut a trench 40 meters deep into the side of the mountain. They never found the entrance. After the fall of the Tang, the warlord Wen Tao excavated ten other Tang imperial tombs and looted them systematically. He turned his attention to Qianling. He sent thousands of mountain. They dug for days. According to the chronicles, the sky turned black, a storm came in off the Wei River plain, lightning struck the mountain repeatedly, several of his men were killed, and the rest fled in superstitious terror. Wen Tao never went back. In the 1920s, the republican general Sun Lianzhang stationed his troops at Qianling under the pretext of Then, using live fire military exercises as cover, he ordered an entire division to use explosives to blast their way into the tomb. They detonated charges across the mountainside for weeks. They opened craters, cratered the slopes, and never found the sealed tunnel. They left, defeated by a tomb, built more than 1,200 years before dynamite was invented. In 1958, local farmers using explosives to break up rocks for terrace farming accidentally exposed the outer end of the tomb tunnel. The Chinese state was briefly electric. With the possibility that Qianling could now be opened, plans were drawn up, excavation proposals went up the chain of command in Beijing, and then Premier Zhou Enlai personally intervened. He wrote on the excavation plan a single line that has since become famous in Chinese archaeology. We should not finish all the good deeds, he wrote. This task can be left for future generations to complete. The state council issued a national moratorium on excavating imperial tombs. Qianling was sealed again, this time officially. In 2012, the Shaanxi Administration of Cultural Heritage extended that moratorium for at least 50 more The reasons given are practical. Modern conservation cannot yet handle the air-sensitive silks and paintings that may be inside. The Ming Dynasty Dingling Tomb was opened in 1956 and most of its organic contents were destroyed within days by exposure to air and light. The Chinese authorities have decided that until the technology exists to preserve whatever is inside, nothing comes out. But underneath the practicality, there is something else. Every previous attempt was stopped by storms, by failed engineering, by accident, by death. The tomb has never been violated. The only woman in 2,000 years to formally rule China lies in her sealed mountain with her husband, with her wordless steel above her head, in a queue of warlords and emperors and farmers who tried to break in and failed stretching back across 13 centuries. She is still winning. On the black marble lid of the sarcophagus, painted in white letters on the polished stone, are five Latin words. Here is the hammer of the Scots. The inscription was probably added in the 16th century, 200 years after his death. The man it describes did not need an epitaph. The Scots already knew Edward I of England was six foot two inches tall, which is why they called him Longshanks. He came to the throne in 1272 and spent the next 35 years trying to fold Wales, Scotland, and Gascony into a single English ruled state. He conquered Wales in 1283. He stole the Stone of from the Abbey at Scone in 1296 and had it built into the seat of his coronation throne so that every future English monarch would be crowned symbolically on top of the kings of Scotland. He hanged, drew and quartered William Wallace in 1305. In 1307, with rebellion flaring under Robert the Bruce, he set out at the age of 68 on what he intended to be the final punitive expedition against the Scots, swearing he would burn the country flat. He never made it. He died of dysentery at Byrd-by-Sands on the marshes just south of the Scottish border on the 7th of July 1307 in the arms of his servants as they tried to lift him up to feed him. He had been refusing to be carried in a litter. He had wanted to ride into Scotland on a horse. He almost made it. He missed the border by four miles. And the deathbed instructions he is alleged to have left are what makes the tomb at Westminster Abbey one of the strangest pieces of medieval revenge in European history. According to chroniclers, including the French writer Jean Froissart, the dying king summoned his son and made him swear an oath. When I am dead, the king said, boil my body until the flesh comes away from the bones. Take the flesh away and bury it. But the bones, the bones you will carry with you at the head of the English army every time you cross into Scotland. Until the Scots have been broken and the country is England, so long as my bones go with the army, he said, Scotland will never know peace. So long as my bones go with the army, Scotland will fall. The story is almost certainly an embellishment. The chronicle sources late, the contemporary record does not corroborate it. Historians like Michael Prestwich have suggested it reflects Edward's later reputation rather than his actual deathbed words. But it has lodged itself in the popular memory of the king for 700 years for a reason. Because if you knew Edward I, you believed it. This was a man who had thrown his daughter's coronet into a fire in a tantrum. This was a man who had assaulted a squire at a wedding. This was a man who had set such terror in the heart of the Dean of St. Paul's according to the chronicle, the dean had died of fright simply by entering the king's presence. He boiled the bones of his enemies. He would boil himself for the satisfaction of haunting his enemies in death. Edward II, his son, ignored the instruction. The young king had no interest in waging the war his father had wanted. He buried Edward I intact in a plain black marble sarcophagus in Westminster Abbey near the shrine of Edward the Confessor. He turned south as soon as the funeral was over. He recalled his lover Piers Gaveston from exile, which his father with his last breath had explicitly forbidden. He left Scotland to Robert the Bruce. Seven years later, Bruce destroyed an English army at Bannockburn. Scotland kept its independence for another 296 years. The hammer of the Scots, in the end, did not get to keep hammering. But the body inside that black marble sarcophagus at Westminster has not stayed undisturbed. In 1774, the Society of Antiquaries opened the tomb to settle scholarly questions about how Edward had been embalmed. They prized the lid up, looked inside, and found a man preserved with shocking completeness. Edward I lay in the coffin almost as he had been buried. His body was wrapped in a waxed linen cloth. Under the cloth, he was dressed in royal robes. He held a scepter in each hand. He still wore a crown of gilded tin. His face was visible through the wrappings. He had been 6 feet 2 inches in life. He measured exactly 6 feet 2 in 1774. He was still recognizably himself 467 years after his death. The Antiquarians took notes, took sketches, took measurements, and sealed the tomb back up. And then the inscription on the lid, the one that had probably been added by Tudor sympathizers anxious to claim Edward as a national hero, stayed where it had always been. Scoterum Malleus Hic Est. Here is the hammer of the Scots. Inside, the hammer himself, intact, dressed for war, sceptered and crowned, lying in his own perfect dark, still ready in case anybody ever did decide to dig him up and march him north. Number 2. The Exploding Tomb of William the Conqueror. Caen, Normandy, September 1087. The Abbey of St. Etienne is full. Bishops, abbots, knights, royal officials, every name in the upper ranks of Norman society has come to see the burial of the man who 21 years earlier had conquered England at Hastings, killed King Harold with an arrow through the eye, become the first Norman King of England, and ruled both sides of the Channel through fear and tax. William the Conqueror. William the Bastard, as his enemies called him, the most feared man in 11th century Europe. He is dead. He has been dead by the day of the funeral for several weeks. And during those weeks, his body has been doing what bodies do in the warm late summer of northern France. The stage is set for one of the most appalling funerals in royal history. Let's go back. Six weeks before his death, William was campaigning in the Vexen against his own son Robert, who had rebelled with French royal support. While riding through the burning town of Mantis, William's horse reared sharply over a hot ember. The king was a large man and was sitting heavily in the saddle. The high pommel of the saddle drove itself up into his abdomen with enormous force. Something inside him ruptured. His intestines burst. There was no surgery in 1087 that could repair that injury. He was carried back to ruin and spent the next six weeks dying in agony, his stomach distending, his fever rising, infections spreading through his guts. He had time to confess his sins. He repented, according to one chronicler, of the harrying of the north, his campaign in 1069-70 that had killed perhaps 100,000 people in Yorkshire through deliberate famine. He gave instructions for his sons and his treasure. And then, on the 9th of September, 1087, he died. The minute he stopped breathing, the room emptied. Every wealthy nobleman in the chamber bolted out of the door to ride to his own castle and protect his property from the inevitable succession war. The lesser servants stayed long enough to strip the dead king of his rings, his clothes, his bed linen, the silver ewers and basins by the bed, anything they could carry. They left William naked on the floor of his own bed chamber. He stayed there for hours before a passing knight found him and took pity on him. The knight paid for an embalming of sorts, although the body had already started to decompose. Then, the corpse was loaded onto a cart and trundled the 75 miles to Caen, to the great abbey William had founded as penance for marrying his cousin Matilda, where he had ordered to be buried. By the time the cart reached Caen, the body inside was several days past embalming and the September weather was warmer than anybody had bargained for. The bishop and the monks came out to meet the cortege, at which point a fire broke out somewhere in the town of Caen. Several of the monks ran to help fight it. The cortege paused. The body sat in its cart, in the heat. The bishop returned. The procession started up again. They reached the abbey. They began the funeral mass. Then a citizen of Caen interrupted the entire ceremony to claim that the abbey itself had been built on land that William had stolen from his father, and that the king of England was not going to be buried in the ground of a Lawrence family that had never been compensated. The bishop and the king's son, Henry, who was present, had to convene a legal hearing in the middle of the funeral to negotiate compensation. Sixty shillings was eventually paid to the heckler. The compensation was settled. The funeral resumed. By now, the body was, frankly, ripe. The Norman chroniclers, particularly Orderic Vitalis, do not spare the reader. The stone sarcophagus that had been prepared in the floor of the abbey turned out to be too small. William, who in his prime had been an unusually tall and broad man, had grown so corpulent in late middle age that his frame did not fit the box. By this point, however, the body had bloated past even its living size, distended by the gases of decomposition, the abdomen straining against the burial linen like an overinflated bladder. The monks tried to fit him in anyway. They pressed. They pushed. They angled the corpse. They forced. The funeral congregation watched. The grave diggers leaned their weight on the king's chest to compress the body into the stone. And the body burst. The abdominal wall, already at the limit of what putrefaction could hold together, split open under the weight, the gases inside vented in a single horrific eruption. The chroniclers described the sound. The chroniclers described the smell. An intolerable stench, Orderic writes, assailed the nostrils of the bystanders and the whole crowd. Frankincense was lit. Spices were thrown into censors. Nothing helped. Mourners fled the abbey, retching, traumatized, splattered with the putrefaction of the most feared king in Europe. The monks finished the rite as quickly as decency allowed. The shortened service was almost a whisper. The lid was clapped on. William the Conqueror, the iron-fisted king of England, was sealed into his tomb in a smell so terrible that the abbey had to be aired for days. And the tomb did not stay sealed. Calvinist mobs broke into the abbey in 1562 during the wars of religion and scattered most of his bones. A single thighbone was eventually rescued and reburied. The French Revolution finished the job in 1793 when revolutionaries smashed the marker stone. Today, in the center of the choir of St. Etienne in Caen, a single black marble slab marks the spot where the Conqueror of England burst over his mourners. The tomb is sealed. The body is mostly gone. The smell, the chroniclers say, is the part the abbey never forgot. Some kings are sealed in for protection. William was sealed in to contain him. Number 1. The Cursed Tomb of Casimir IV. Wawel Cathedral, Krakow, Friday the 13th of April, 1973. There are twelve men in the chapel, eleven archaeologists and conservators, one photographer. They have permission from the highest religious authority in Poland. The man who signed the permission slip is the Cardinal of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla. In five years, the Cardinal will be elected Pope John Paul II. He will never publicly comment on what he authorized that morning. The team has spent weeks preparing. They have measured the marble tomb of Casimir IV Jagiellon, the late 15th century king of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, the man who broke the Teutonic Order and brought Prussia under Polish rule, the man who consolidated the Jagiellonian dynasty and made Krakow the center of Central European power. He died in 1492. He was placed inside the tomb that the German sculptor Weizstaß had carved for him out of red marble, a late Gothic masterpiece. His wife Elisabeth of Austria joined him in 1505. The tomb was sealed. The dust gathered. For 481 years, nobody opened it, until Friday the 13th of April, 1973. The team have a sense of humor about the date. There are jokes about King Tut's curse, about the nine people who died after Howard Carter opened a Tutankhamen in 1922, about the pharaohs reaching from the grave. They take photographs. They lever back the slab. And inside, in the rotted remains of a wooden coffin, they find what 481 years of damp Polish stone does to a king. Casimir's body is decayed past recognition. The wood of the coffin has gone soft. The royal vestments are stained and torn. There are scraps of brocade. There are bones. There is dust. There is something else too, although nobody at the time recognizes it. There is a film. A faint greenish yellow coating on the surfaces of the inside of the tomb, on the wood of the coffin, on the cloth of the burial robes, on the bones themselves. It looks like mold. It looks like old damp. It looks like nothing. The team take samples. They photograph everything. They handle the remains directly. They breathe the air of a tomb that has been sealed since the year Columbus reached the Americas. They smile for photographs. They go home that evening. Within a few days, four of them are dead. The first to go is Felix Dabrowski. He has a sudden massive stroke. He is in his 50s. He has no history of cardiovascular illness. Then Stefan Walczak. Also a stroke. Also sudden. Also dead. Within hours. Then Rudolf Kozlowski. A cardiac event. No warning. Then a fourth member of the team in the same week. The pattern is so abrupt and so violent that nobody can quite process it at first. The cardinal, who gave the permission, is silent. The press picks up the story. The phrase Jagiellonian Curse appears in Warsaw papers. The remaining eight members of the team continue with their conservation work in laboratories around Poland, handling the materials from the tomb, taking samples, writing reports, breathing the air of rooms in which the materials from the tomb are now laid out and drying. Within six months, four more are dead. Cancer. Stroke. Sudden organ failure. Heart attack. By the autumn of 1973, only two of the twelve men who entered the tomb are still alive. One of them is the photographer, who took the photographs from the door of the chapel and never actually went inside. The other is Dr. Boleslaw Smyk, a microbiologist who joined the project not as an archaeologist, but specifically because of his background in fungi and contamination. He is also ill. He has developed a chronic infection of the inner ear that destroys his balance and forces him to walk with a cane for the next five years. But he can think, and he is the only one who can think. Because Smyk knows fungi, he knows what they look like, what they do, what they release. He takes samples from the tomb interior, he takes samples from the materials around the coffin, he takes samples from the laboratory air, and he identifies growing across the inside surfaces of the tomb, growing across the wood and the cloth and the bone, three species of mold. The most dangerous is Aspergillus flavus. Aspergillus flavus is a saprophytic fungus. It eats organic material. It is common in nature. It is found in stored grain. It is found in damp warehouses. But it produces, in certain conditions, a class of secondary metabolites called aflatoxins. Aflatoxins are among the most carcinogenic substances known to science. They are not symbolic. They are not metaphorical. Inhaled aflatoxin spores will, in vulnerable lungs, cause everything from immediate respiratory failure to massive cellular damage in the liver, to delayed onset cancers and strokes through cardiovascular dysregulation. Aspergillus flavus is the same fungus that microbiologists later identified inside the mummy of Ramses II. It is the same fungus that has been blamed for the death of Lord Carnarvon, the patron of Howard Carter, who died five months after entering Tutankhamen's tomb in 1923. The curse of the pharaohs was, in microbiological terms, the curse of Aspergillus flavus, and it had been waiting in the sealed tomb of Casimir IV of Poland for 481 years. The conditions in the marble tomb were almost perfect for it. Cool. Dark. Damp. Organic material in abundance. The body itself was the food source. The wooden coffin was the substrate. The sealed air was the incubator. The fungus had grown undisturbed in the dark of Wawel Cathedral, generation after generation of spores producing aflatoxin in vast concentrations, until the day the lid came off. The twelve men who entered breathed the highest dose of aflatoxin spores any group of human beings had inhaled in modern memory. They didn't notice. The spores are odorless. They are invisible. The first symptoms can take hours, days, or months to appear. The damage is already done by the time you realize anything is wrong. Smik lived. He published his findings. The scientific community accepted the conclusion the Jagiellonian curse had a name. Pope John Paul II never spoke about it publicly. He took the secret of what he had authorized on the wrong Friday, in the wrong cathedral, into the Vatican with him. The tomb of Casimir IV has been resealed. It will not be opened again. There are ten men in Polish soil who paid the price for being curious, and the fungus, somewhere in the marble dark of Wawel Cathedral, is still waiting. So, now you have all ten, the prince who dissolved into nothing behind a pub, the Shah of Khwarezm buried in a borrowed shirt on a Caspian island nobody can find, Theodoric under his impossible dome with his bones scattered to the wind, Wycliffe's ashes carried into every sea, the Crusader Emperor in his Arabic silk and his stolen robes, the void at the center of Sutton Hoo, the Empress sleeping inside her mountain, while warlords died trying to reach her, the Hammer of the Scots in his black marble still ready for the march that never came, the Conqueror who exploded over his mourners, and the King of Poland whose tomb was so deadly that the men who opened it died one by one. The medieval world sealed its dead for reasons, sometimes to keep the dead from leaving, sometimes to keep the living from getting in, sometimes to lock down a problem the world was not ready to solve, and sometimes in the dark of a tomb that has been closed for five centuries, the reason grows quietly into something that will kill the first person to lift the lid. Tell us in the comments which of these stories you had heard before and which one you had not. Tell us which one you think we got the ranking wrong on. Tell us where you are watching from, because the comment sections of this channel are full of people from every country on earth and we want to know where this video found you. If this changed how you think about the medieval dead, hit the like button right now. Every like tells the algorithm to put this video in front of more people who want their history with the lid open. Subscribe, because we have more of this coming. More forgotten kings, more ruined tombs, more medieval stories that the textbooks left out. Thank you for watching The Tombs Were Sealed for a Reason. Now you know why.