The penal law in force in the late Middle Ages and modern times in Polish cities provided for severe penalties, including the main penalty, in the case of many crimes:for witchcraft, sacrilege, desecration of a corpse, sometimes even for theft. However, there were few crimes as repulsive to the contemporary inhabitants of the Republic of Poland as bestiality, that is - in the modern language - zoophilia.
How John Panaska was caught in a brutal act
One Saturday in September 1646, the shoemaker Wojciech from Kleczew (eastern Greater Poland) was returning from a meeting with friends at a local inn that was prolonged until late at night. Walking along the market square, probably tired of spending hours at the inn, he decided to shorten his way home, crossing the empty square between two houses. Suddenly his eyes saw an unexpected sight:here is the well-known Jan Panasek, a city hen, having sexual intercourse with a cow in the barn . Terrified by this view, Wojciech immediately rushed to the house of Grzegorz Czajka, the city councilor who owned the animal, to report everything to him.
The next morning, Grzegorz Czajka called the other representatives of the authorities to investigate the recent helper. Wojciech, who acted as the prosecutor, described the details of the whole incident in detail, even giving the characteristics of the cow used by Panaska.
Asked by the court whether he pleaded guilty, Jan Panasek categorically denied it. As the accusation was extremely serious, the court decided to question him under torture . Although today this form of extracting testimony seems inhumane at best, in the early modern era it was treated as a natural way of extracting the truth from people suspected of having committed the most serious crimes. The city servant placed in the hands of the executioner not only admitted his guilt, but also confessed that it was not supposed to be the first time he had had intercourse with an animal:he had done it twice with other cows of the same farmer before. Due to the fact that the defendant admitted to the crime, the city court sentenced Jan Panaska to the death penalty .
A sin against God and nature
Bartłomiej Groicki, a modern theoretician of law, who tried to adapt to Poland the penal solutions adopted in German countries (including the so-called Caroline, a set of laws issued by Emperor Charles V), in this way recommended punishing people caught having sexual intercourse with animals:
Wherever there should be such a man that he should have an affair with beasts ... be severely punished.
Severe punishments proposed by Groicki, intended to punish the guilty in equal measure, which would scare other potential perpetrators from committing this crime were deeply rooted in Judeo-Christian culture. Already one of the oldest books in the Old Testament, Leviticus, clearly indicated human-animal sexual intercourse as one of the reasons why God brought a flood to earth :
You will not associate body with any animal; it would make you unclean. Neither will the woman stand before the animal to join it. […] The earth also became unclean. So I punished her for her guilt and the earth spat out new inhabitants.
Breaking a circle was one of the methods of execution commonly used in old Europe
In the modern era, steeped in various threats and crises, the fear of death and God's punishment was extremely strong - the etiology of many serious diseases was unknown at that time, and efforts were made to explain the daily dangers within the available cognitive horizon. It is not difficult to imagine how much fear must have been caused by the crime, which the Bible explicitly mentions as one of the reasons why God brought a cataclysm to Earth in the past (especially after the Council of Trent, when the Church adopted a new, more severe way of educating the faithful in morality, emphasizing the harsh punishments awaiting sinners not only in death but also in life). Such and not other judgments of municipal courts in cases of zoophilia were not unfounded in modern realities and should not surprise us today - in the eyes of those times they removed from a given community the risk of God's always real anger, which could send a "pestilent air" at any moment to punish sinners and cleanse the earth again. Because in the end bestialitas it was just one of many crimes that Europeans of the time thought could make God angry.
Bibliography:
Sources:
- Millennium Bible.
- Groicki B., Progress of the courts about punishment on the throat, ed. K. Koranyi, Warsaw 1954.
- Book of the court of the mayor of the city of Kleczew, Library of the Poznań Society of Friends of Sciences, manuscript. 859.
Literature of the subject:
- Grodziski S., From the history of old Polish legal culture, Krakow 2004.
- Kamler M., The role of torture in the Polish municipal judiciary in the second half of the 16th and first half of the 17th century, 3/1988, pp. 109–125.
- Kuchowicz Z., Man of the Polish Baroque, Łódź 1992.
- Tazbir J., Cruelty in modern Europe, Warsaw 1993.
- Wiślicz T., Society of Kleczew and the surrounding area in the fight against the devil (1624–1700), "Kwartalnik Historyczny", Rocznik CXII, 2004, issue 2, pp. 38-60.
- Wiślicz T., Pedagogy of fear in the post-Tridentine Church in Poland, [in:] Sic erat in fatis. Historical studies and sketches dedicated to Professor Bogdan Rok, edited by E. Kościk, R. Żerelik, P. Badyna, F. Wolański, vol. I, Toruń 2012, pp. 283–295.