During one of the earlier revolutions in Southern Italy the Neapolitan lazaroni (whether from hunger or to manifest intense hatred towards their rulers, as well as to exhibit the wretchedness to which they had been reduced,) roasted their fellow men in the public streets, and gave to all who were willing to partake.
At the time when Belisarius was engaged in the Gothic war, a horrible famine afflicted Italy, and it is the testimony of Procopius that on this occasion multitudes in the agony of their want sustained life by eating human flesh.
When Rome was captured by the Goths in the year 410 and the ports blockaded, there was such a distress among the Romans that human flesh was publicly sold in the markets; and many mothers were forced to consume their own children.
It is recorded also that the Jews (having destroyed upwards of two hundred thousand Romans in the time of Trajan) glutted their rage by feeding on the bodies of some of the slain.
Glaber chronicles that during the famine of 1033 in France, guests were sacrificed by Frenchmen who had welcomed them to their hospitality; children were enticed into secret places and slain, and frequently human flesh was exposed for sale in the markets. At the same period, a woman who lived by letting lodgings murdered and ate seventeen strangers who had made their home beneath her roof. The fact of these enormities accidentally came to the knowledge of the eighteenth lodger; having entered her house and anticipating her purpose, to save his own life he took that of his hostess.
CANNIBALISM BY ENTOMBED MINERS.
(Boulogne Dispatch to the London Times.)
“Excavations in the Chancelade quarries, where it will be remembered a landslip occurred last October burying a number of workmen, have been carried on ever since for the purpose of unearthing the bodies. For many days after the slip was believed to have been smothered, the workers smoke was seen to issue from the ruins. Soldiers and quarrymen, directed by a party of engineers, worked day and night in hopes of taking the men out alive. Ever since the work has proceeded, but of late the endeavors were not so vigorously plied. The diggers have now reached the actual spot where the men were engaged at the time of the accident, and on penetrating into a gallery cut in the stone the explorers discovered the body of a young man lying on the ground. Photographs taken of the position show that a dreadful state of affairs must have come about when the men uncrushed found themselves entombed. It appears undoubted that some of the men tried to prolong their lives by killing and eating their companions in misfortune. A few solitary arms and limbs have been picked up in their prison, and everything points to the fact that cannibalism was resorted to. The young man whose body was unmutilated seems to have survived the others, and to have died of hunger.”
Schweinfurth, in a work entitled “Heart of Africa,” assures his readers that tribes in Africa even now wage war with neighboring tribes, for the avowed purpose of obtaining human flesh to dry for provisions.
On the authority of Dr. Schweinfurth the Niam-Niams, also of Central Africa, devour the bodies of their dead enemies, and when any one of their people is old, feeble or so near dying, to use the sailor’s simile in Charles Dickens’ famous story, “he needn’t be so very partick’ler about a few minutes,” he is killed and eaten. Runaway slaves when recaptured always meet this fate, though as a rule the slaves in this tribe rarely attempt to escape.