In 1184, sixty of Germany's most powerful nobles fell through a rotting floor into a cesspit — one of the most undignified mass deaths in medieval history.
On July 26, 1184, approximately sixty German noblemen attending a royal court assembly in Erfurt died when the floor of the building they were meeting in collapsed — dropping them through the ground floor and into a large sewage cesspit below. Some were killed by the fall and the debris; others drowned in human waste. It remains one of the most grimly absurd mass casualty events of the Middle Ages.
The meeting had been convened by the eighteen-year-old King Henry VI, acting on orders from his father Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, to mediate a land dispute between the powerful Archbishop of Mainz and the Landgrave of Thuringia. The assembled attendees included regional nobles, bishops, and prominent citizens — exactly the kind of high-status gathering that placed enormous weight on the upper floor of a building whose wooden support beams had quietly rotted through.
The collapse was total. The weight of the assembled nobility caused the upper floor to give way; the impact then buckled the ground floor beneath it, and the combined mass of people and wreckage fell into the underground cesspit. Contemporary chronicles name several high nobles who perished, including Count Friedrich I of Abenberg and Count Heinrich I of Schwarzburg.
King Henry VI and Archbishop Conrad of Mainz — two of the most important men in the room — survived by luck of seating. Both had been sitting in a stone window alcove that held firm while the wooden floor collapsed around them. They were rescued by attendants with ladders after clinging to the alcove as the floor disappeared beneath them.
The disaster entered German folklore centuries later, with chroniclers embellishing the story into a morality tale. One popular retelling centered on Count Heinrich of Schwarzburg, who supposedly had a habit of joking that if he ever committed a particular sin he would deserve to drown in a privy — and was then killed by doing exactly that. The event has a small but devoted following among historians of medieval structural failure and unfortunate irony.