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It was definitely not an organised bbq. Cornelis de Witt and his brother Johan were dragged from the prison by a rabid mob. They beat, stabbed and shot the brothers until they were dead. After that they were strung up and gutted, and supposedly some people had a few bites or fed some to their dogs
The Dutch creating the first speculative bubble in history, over tulips of all things, also springs to mind.
Our (possibly ill-named) Golden Age was a strange period – invention of the first multinational, the first stock exchange and the first precursor of a central bank, all paid for by atrocious slavery. It culminated in the Disaster Year, prompting the BBQ that OP mentioned.
It’s possible a person could have experienced all of that in their lifetime.
Our country got started with our first king warring against his mother.
The whole reason we ended up in a “brief” union with Spain was because our king at the time disappeared in North Africa.
During the Napoleonic Invasions the royal family went to Brazil, and for a time Rio de Janeiro became the capital. That was the first and only (I believe) time that a European country’s capital was in another continent.
Our dictator Salazar died falling from a chair.
The story of the brothers De Witt seems to have really conquered reddit recently, but is unfortunately full of misinformation. They were indeed lynched and dismembered, but as far as I know it was never proven that they were actually eaten as far as I remember. For a long time there were people selling ‘parts of their bodies’ as a kind of curiosity.
The mob was originally instigated by Orangists (monarchist) to push Cornelis De Witt into a confession and power transfer to the stadhouder, but it got out of hand since there was a lot of anxiety due to the French invasion and after the event the Orangist propaganda machine played up the event to legitimize their take over of the government and need for a ‘strong man’ to bring back order.
The Irish Court of Appeal found that drug legislation (Misuse of Drugs Act 1977) was unconstitutional in 2015 and as a result you could not be arrested for possessing ecstasy, crystal meth and ketamine – it was for a single day as legislators brought in an emergency law the following day to close the loophole!
I always like how the people of Hartlepool are known as “monkey hangers”.
This is because *”According to local folklore, the term originates from an apocryphal incident in which a monkey was hanged in the town of Hartlepool, England. During the Napoleonic Wars, a French chasse-marée was wrecked in a storm off the coast of Hartlepool. The only survivor from the ship was a monkey, allegedly dressed in a French Army uniform to provide amusement for the crew. On finding the monkey on the beach, a group of locals decided to hold an impromptu trial. Because the monkey was unable to answer their questions, and because they had seen neither a monkey nor a Frenchman before, they concluded that the monkey must be a French spy.[2] Being found guilty, the animal was duly sentenced to death and summarily hanged on the beach.”*
Several important events in recent German history randomly take place on a 9 November.
On 9 November 1848, Robert Blum, the most important leader of the March Revolution, is executed by troops of the Austrian Emperor, which puts an end to the republican uprisings in the several German States.
On 9 November 1918, Max von Baden announced the abdication of the Emperor on his own authority. Phillip Scheidemann from the the Social Democrats proclaims the first German republic hours later in Berlin.
9 November 1923, failed Hitler-Ludendorff putsch in Munich against the Weimar Republic.
9 November 1938, November pogrom, Germans loot shops, destroy property and murder their fellow Jewish Citizens. 7,500 Jewish shops were destroyed, over 1,200 synagogues burned down and countless homes devastated. 91 Jews were beaten to death, stabbed or beaten to death.
9 November 1989, fall of the Berlin Wall.
When Christianity was spreading the question came up if it should be the nations faith.
We got one guy to make that decision and he decided to sleep on it.
When he woke up he went.
Aye yeah we’ll do the Christ thing, everyone else is still fine, just you know….hide it.
In 1908 General Dietrich von Hülsen-Haeseler died while dancing for the Kaiser in a pink tutu and rose wreath of a ballerina.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_von_H%C3%BClsen-Haeseler
In Berlin at the end of the 18th century, non-married woman from age 20 to 40 had to pay 2 Groschen “Virgin tax” every month.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungfernsteuer (only German)
Mos Teutonicus once was a postmortem funerary custom. They took apart the body, boiled the parts in water, wine or other stuff for several hours. This would lead to the flesh to be separated from the bone. Friedrich I. was one of those who had this kind of funeral…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mos_Teutonicus
Probably many more…
I’m quite fond of the “Lightning Cabinet” in the 1840s.
On a Tuesday, Prime Minister Narváez was sacked by queen Isabel II, on Wednesday Serafín de Sotto was appointed PM, and on Thursday Narváez was appointed PM again.
Nobody knows for sure what the hell was going on.
The president Felix Faure (which led the country during times of colonization and political unrests) died in the Palais de l’elysée, the domicile of the french presidents.
It just so happens that his favorite prostitute was visiting at the time…
So yeah, people called the affair the “pompe funère”, meaning “mortuary service”, but pompe also means to gobble on the eggplant, so its “the deadly oral service”
Where do I even start…
A topical one: an ex-con somehow became the president’s cook, then staged a military coup and died in an “ordinary” plane crash.
Similar to the Dutch BBQ: during many of the early USSR’s famines, people would butcher their own relatives, including children, and eat (or sell?) the meat. [Here’s a photo.](https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B4_%D0%B2_%D0%9F%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B6%D1%8C%D0%B5_(1921%E2%80%941922)#/media/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:Cannibalism_during_Russian_famine_1921.jpg)
A subjective one: the Tunguska event. What the hell even was that?
The North Berwick witch trials are up there – read about it [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Berwick_witch_trials).
tl;dr: The Danish princess who was to marry King James VI (later King James I of Great Britain) had a bad voyage, and it was blamed on witches, leading to the usual contagious madness.
The other crazy Scottish stories that immediately come to mind are the body snatchers: gangs who would steal bodies from fresh graves to sell them to the medical school at Edinburgh University for dissection. “Resurrectionists” were apprantly active elsewhere, but only in Edinburgh have I seen graves built with cages to make sure no one could steal the body.
And the other one is the tale of Mary Queen of Scots (Maria Stuart), from Queen of France as a teenager to the subject of John Knox’s “Counterblast”, her [bizarre love triangle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lord_Darnley) with Bothwell and Darnley and the latter’s murder, imprisonment, “escape” to England, imprisonment again, then execution by her cousin. The most dramatic biography never to have been turned into a costume drama!
Our soldiers won a [naval battle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lake_Baikal) against Russians despite our country having no navy.
From time to time, we throw politicans out of windows and change the course of history. When we did it in 1419, we started first protestant movement which later inspired Luther. In 1618, we started Thirty Years War in the same way.
There was once a history geek called [Josef Mencik](https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/x0gzua/josef_mencik_the_last_knight_he_lived_in/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=2). He was called *the last knight*, becuase he lived in a castle, wore a set of plate armour, followed a medieval code of honour and teached local children about history. When Wehrmacht invaded Sudeten, Mencik took his armour on and rode on a horse towards the incoming tanks and blocked the road with his own body.
Germans though Mencik was crazy and let him live. The man lived long enough to see his country liberated from evil, and died before another totalitarian government took over.
It’s sad this story has been largery forgotten, so I’m mentioning it always when such question occures. People should remember these small acts of great bravery.
As late as 1782, a maidservant named Anna Göldi was tried and beheaded in Glarus for entering a pact with the devil and behexing a child so that it vomited needles and pins.
At that time, nobody seriously believed in witchcraft anymore, it was a pretense because the poor woman had an affair with her employer. The authorities were aware and avoided the terms “witch” and “witchcraft” during the trial. It’s all rather sketchy and I don’t understand the exact character constellations.
Anyway, that was the last witch trial of Europe.
Maybe not the most bizarre, but still bizarre and recent – we had a giant Tu141 USSR era military drone crash in the capital, just 100m away from the crowded student dorms.
Weird, but accidents happen. The bizarre thing is that basically no one ever talked about it. One agency had a press conference the next day, they said it had traces of explosives, another one said it didn’t, and it was never mentioned again. They never said how it ended up here, was it Russian or Ukranian, why wasn’t it shot down while flying over 2 other NATO states…
During the Crimean war, British naval forces made landings in various port cities on the Finnish coast, where they would burn the ships and tar storages, along other raiding schenanigans.
The crazy landing took place in Kokkola, where the landing was crushed by a mob of peasants and some Russian soldiers with the help of a fake fence. They constructed a fake fence (I suppose it was a pretty real fence but fake in the sense that it was built for this), and once the British came close, they knocked down the fence they were hiding behind and opened fire on the British.
In the resulting battle, 18 British sailors and officers were killed, and a further 34 officers and sailors captured, against 3 or 4 defenders.
And thus the British empire was beaten with a fake fence.
Edit: I miss remembered the question and added a comment outside ops topic
A story from memory and only fact checked with Wikipedia because I am sleepy.
Short version:
The Danish king Canute the Holy pissed off the peasentry after keeping them away from their harvest and fining them. He ended up being killed in after seeling refuge in a church on Funen. Which his friends used to get him canonized as the first Danish Saint
Long version:
The first Danish Saint was King Knud IV or Canute the Holy.
The dear king wanted to invade England. But he didn’t want to launch the invasion after it was gathered, because he was worried about the a potential invasion by Holy Roman Emperor. As harvest season approached did the peasants in the army get worried if they can get home in time, so they elected the kings half-brother to request that the king begin the invasion or dismantle the army. The king refused, imprisoned his brother and sent him to Flanders. When summer hit he decided it was too late and sent the army home, and wanted them to regroup next year. The king also decided to fine all the farmers who left efter he denied their earlier request.
He then stayed in a royal estate near where the army had gathered, when the local farmers rebelled. He tried to flee but the rebels followed all the way to Odense where the king sought sanctuary in Saint Albani church. Which the rebels stormed after a failed arson attempt. The king, his brother Benedict and 17 loyal guards was killed.
or the king was hit by a stone in the head and then assassinated by a rebel with a hidden sword.
He was canonized after his brother used a famine as proof of god’s anger over Knuds murder
UK, well, where to start? In the past few years we’ve had:
* Brexit (which most people now think either was a mistake or badly implemented),
* Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini-budget that caused significant short-term economic fall-out (we have yet to see if there are long term effects),
* The shortest serving Prime Minister (at less than half the term of the previous shortest who had died in office) – again Liz Truss (whose term was famously outlasted by a lettuce),
* A former Prime Minister (Boris Johnson) who resigned as an MP after a damning report into him lying to Parliament (it is rare for any MP to be disciplined to that level) and may have led to him being unable to sit in Parliament,
* Multiple instances of the UN criticising the UK on: disabled rights, racism, child welfare, asylum, and human rights generally – our Government just shrugging and effectively ignoring it,
* And most recently: Leaving asylum-seekers living on barge-based housing for 4 days after identifying that there was Legionnaires disease in the water…
We’ve got to the point that it’s a surprise when there are no *WTF!?!* moments over a period of weeks.
When a rocket was launched from Andøya rocketlaunching center in norway in 1995. It’s in the area with proximity to the russian northern fleet and their nuclear arsenal. The launch wasn’t reported to the russian air control center. It was a scientific rocket to study northern light. Though the russian perceived it as a nuclear missile and the nuclear briefcase were said to be brought Boris Jeltsin. Jeltsin “ready” to launch full nuclear attack.. Though the rocket finally ended in the sea before Jeltsin could pull his button..
The time around 1995 was around the time a drunk [Jeltsin](https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-congress/2009/09/yeltsin-drunk-in-his-underwear-hailing-a-cab-021553)was ravelling around in washington dc (not sober) in his underpants.. looking for pizza..