Gilles De Rais

 

Gilles de Rais was a fifteenth-century nobleman whose lust for blood – in particular, the blood of young boys and girls – marked him out as one of the most prolific serial killers in history. The exact number of his victims is not known, because he burned or buried most of the bodies, but it was believed to have been between 80 and 200. Some estimates have put the figure nearer 600. The details of his crimes, which eventually emerged during his trial, shocked the whole of Europe, and still make disturbing reading today. Like his female counterpart Elizabeth Báthory, who lived a century later, he took advantage of his powerful social position to rape, torture, and murder his innocent victims, and for many years continued his depraved life of criminal violence with impunity.

 

The rich heiress

 

Gilles de Rais was born in 1404, the son of a rich nobleman named Guy de Montmorency-Laval and his wife, Marie de Craon. At the age of nine, his father died. His mother immediately remarried, abandoning Gilles and his brother Rene. Two years later she, too, was dead, and the orphans were sent to live with their grandfather, Jean de Craon. By all accounts, de Craon was an ill-tempered individual who took little interest in his two grandsons other than to try to marry them off, while still children, to various rich heiresses. However, as part of this plan, he also made sure that they received an excellent education. The young Gilles became fluent in Latin, and was said to love music. According to some accounts, he particularly enjoyed reading Suetonius, who described in graphic detail the sexual antics of the debauched Roman emperors. He was also instructed in the chivalric arts of war, and later, went on to distinguish himself greatly in his career as a soldier, fighting beside Joan of Arc.

In his teenage years, Gilles was taken to the court of the French Dauphin, where he impressed the nobility with his intelligence and good looks. De Craon made various unsuccessful attempts to marry him off to some of the richest heiresses in France, including Jeanne de Paynol and Beatrice de Rohan, but to no avail. Eventually, he secured him a betrothal to Catherine Thouars of Brittany, an extremely wealthy heiress of Poitou and La Vendee. The couple were duly married, and Catherine bore him a daughter, Marie, in 1429. By now, Gilles was one of the richest noblemen in France.

 

Sadistic nature

 

Early in his career, Gilles de Rais fought for control of Britanny on the side of the Montfort house, against a rival house led by the Count of Penthievre, Olivier De Blois. Eventually, he managed to overcome his enemies and secure the release of the Duke of Montfort. For this, he was rewarded with land grants, which the Breton government of the day converted into monetary gifts for him. In between his fighting engagements, he spent time at court, learning the refined manners of the day, and enjoying the company of the Dauphin, all of which helped to further his career. From 1427 to 1435, he served as a commander in the French royal army, gaining a reputation as a courageous fighter on the battlefield, in combat at Saint Lo and Le Mans. In one instance, during a battle for the control of the Chateau of Lude, he climbed a tower and killed the captain of the opposing side.

However, it was during these battles that de Rais’ sadistic nature began to show itself. He appeared to positively revel in the carnage, and took a personal delight in killing his enemies, whether running them through with a sword or trampling on them with his horse. At the time, this was not generally frowned upon; indeed, the reverse was true, and instead of being reviled as a brutal sadist, Gilles was held up as an example of a brave, upstanding young knight.

 

Joan of Arc

 

In 1429, Gilles de Rais encountered the infamous Joan of Arc. Joan, a 17-year-old peasant girl, had come before the Dauphin, telling him that she knew it to be her destiny to defeat the English army, who at the time were laying siege to the city of Orleans. The Dauphin thought that she was out of her mind, but decided anyway to send her to Orleans with Gilles, who was fascinated by the peasant girl’s bravery – and her mannish looks. Much to the Dauphin’s amazement, Joan went on to defeat the English, with Gilles at her side.

Exactly how important the young knight’s presence was remains a matter of some historical controversy, but there is no doubt that his early association with the Maid of Orleans brought him tremendous fame and honour. (However, when Joan of Arc was burned at the stake only a few years later, Gilles made sure to play down this association.) He was duly appointed Marshal of France, and rewarded with further riches. After a few more years of fighting, he retired to his estates, indulging his taste for luxury by mounting expensive religious services and acquiring an extensive library.

 

Secret vices

 

Retirement from the army, and from the opportunity to kill and maim on the battlefield, seems to have had a dreadful effect on the rich young knight. He began to spend his fortune recklessly, producing a theatrical spectacle called ‘The Mystery of the Siege of Orleans’ in which he played the leading role. The production employed hundreds of actors and costumes, and the audience was treated to sumptuous food and drink. Not surprisingly, he soon began to run out of money, and had to sell much of his property. His brother Rene was so worried about Gilles’ spendthrift ways that he asked the King to help. The King issued an edict forbidding him to sell any more land. His hands tied, Gilles turned his attentions elsewhere.

 

Torture and murder

 

It was around this time that de Rais began to indulge his secret vices. He procured a young street boy named Poitou, brought him to his chateau and raped him. He was then about to cut his throat, when a companion pointed out to him that the boy might make a good page. Gilles spared him, and Poitou became one of his minions. Others were not so lucky.

In the years that followed, Gilles de Rais went on to torture and murder a succession of children, aged between six and 16, most of them boys. According to witnesses, he preferred to commit his vile crimes with boys, but would use girls if necessary. The craving for blood would come upon him like an epileptic fit, as if he were a vampire, and he would not rest until his thirst had been quenched.

He would send out a servant to lure a boy to his chateau. De Rais would pretend to treat him kindly, petting him and offering him drink. He would then be stripped, hung up by a hook, and tortured. Then one of his minions would cut the boy’s throat, which apparently gave de Rais immense delight. After this, the body would be disembowelled and de Rais would play with it, squatting in the entrails and masturbating. Once he had had his fill, he would faint and be carried to bed, to rest while his servants disposed of the body. They did this by dismembering and burning it. In some cases, two boys would be procured at once, and one forced to watch the torture and murder of the other, before his own time came.

It is hard to believe that such crimes went unpunished for years, but tragically, that is what occurred. Most of de Rais’ victims were young boys of low standing, and since he himself was a nobleman, his actions were not questioned, as was the norm during this period of European history.

 

Demons and snakes

 

As well as his bloodlust, de Rais also had a fascination for the occult. He was, by now, running short of money, so he turned to the forbidden art of alchemy as a source. He found a magician named Fontanelle, who claimed to have conjured up a demon called Barron. De Rais agreed to sell his soul to this demon in exchange for the power to make gold. So Fontanelle, de Rais, and his cousin de Sille, entered the dungeon of one of his castles at night to perform the magic rites. However, all that happened was that the roof fell in, and de Rais narrowly escaped with his life.

Not deterred, de Rais hired another magician, a handsome young man called Francois Prelati, to continue his search for gold. Prelati advised him that a child’s blood and body parts would have to be offered to the Devil, and performed various rites that appealed to the gullible de Rais, but failed to yield the treasure he sought. On one occasion, Prelati pretended to have sustained a severe beating from the Devil; on another, he told his employer that a huge pile of gold was waiting for him in the next room, but that it was guarded by a large green snake. De Rais beat a hasty retreat, only to find when he returned that the gold had mysteriously vanished.

 

Madness and depravity

 

Not surprisingly, during these years of madness and depravity, de Rais’ family shunned him, but when they heard that he was about to sell one of his castles, the Chateau Champtoce, in defiance of the royal edict, they seized it. De Rais feared that they would find many bodies of murdered children there, but fortunately for him, they did not. However, as a precaution, he began to remove bodies from his other castles, and later took the opportunity to cover his traces at Champtoce.

By now, his behaviour was becoming ever more erratic. He sold the Chateau Mer Morte, but then decided to take it back, stealing the keys from the new owner’s brother, Jean de Ferron, who happened to be a priest. De Rais and his men turned up at the church, dragged the priest away, and beat him until he offered up the keys. Afterwards, de Rais stayed the night in a town called Vannes, where to celebrate, he raped and decapitated a 10-year-old boy, afterwards throwing the child’s body into a latrine.

 

‘Vices against nature’

 

This attack on the priest was the chance that the authorities had been waiting for. De Rais was arrested and in 1440, was summoned before the court. A large number of witnesses, including the parents of some of the children, gave a testimony against him. According to the bizarre morality of the day, the main charge against him was heresy (because he had entered the church violently and attacked the priest) but he was also accused of other offences, including the rape and murder of the children. In total, he faced 47 charges that ranged from ‘the abuse of clerical privilege’ to ‘the conjuration of demons’, and ‘vices against nature’.

In all, there were 110 witnesses at the trial, which attracted tremendous attention throughout France. History records that the servants’ descriptions of the murders were so horrifying that the judges ordered parts of their testimony to be deleted. One of de Rais’ servants, Etienne Corillait, known as Poitou – who had personal experience of de Rais’ sadism, having been procured as a murder victim himself, and then spared – gave a graphic account of the way de Rais went about extracting maximum enjoyment from his hideous crimes:

‘He had considerable pleasure in watching the heads of children separated from their bodies. Sometimes he made an incision behind the neck to make them die slowly, at which he became very excited … sometimes he would ask, when they were dead, which of them had the most beautiful head.’

Corillait also described, in graphic detail, how de Rais masturbated over the children’s bodies, both when they were dead and when they were alive.

 

Final execution

 

Some believe that these accounts, extracted as they were under torture, were exaggerated. Certainly, de Rais himself was so brutally tortured that by the end of the trial, he was confessing to anything. His trial was farcical, even by the standards of the day, and the main objection to his behaviour seemed to be that it was heretical, rather than the fact that he had murdered dozens, if not hundreds, of innocent children. Eventually, he was sentenced to death, garrotted and his body thrown onto a funeral pyre. However, before the pyre was lit, his family were allowed to take the body away for burial.

In his chronicles of the period, the French nobleman Enguerrand de Monstrelet, wrote: ‘The greater part of the nobles of Brittany, more especially his own kindred, were in utmost grief and confusion at his disgraceful death. Before this event, he was much renowned as a most valiant knight at arms.’

 

The legacy of de Rais

 

Today, the extent of de Rais’ crimes is the subject of some controversy among historians. There is no doubt that his trial was carried out with such disregard for the law that the findings of it cannot be seen as entirely valid. De Rais was not allowed to give testimony in his defence, and nor were any of his family, friends, or servants. Indeed, the ecclesiastic and secular authorities showed such bias in their attitude towards him that it is hard not to doubt the accuracy of their conclusions.

In her book, The Witch Cult of Western Europe, anthropologist Margaret Murray argues that de Rais was possibly involved in a fertility cult centred around the pagan goddess Diana, and that he was tried and executed, like Joan of Arc before him, for heresy. Others have suggested that de Rais might have been framed by the Church, or by other elements within the French nobility, as part of a plot to take over his remaining lands. It is certainly true that his crazed behaviour made him an easy target for any power group wishing to divest him of his rapidly dwindling estates.

However, the testimony of so many witnesses, including his young victims’ parents, would suggest that Gilles was indeed guilty of serial murder, and that after his glorious days as a young soldier, he descended into a nightmare world of madness, debauchery, and violence that only ended when he was finally put to death, on 26 October 1440.