A closer look
King Henry VI decided to hold a diplomatic diet at the Petersberg Citadel in Erfurt in 1184 to settle a nasty feud between two powerful nobles, but the sheer weight of the assembled aristocrats caused the wooden floor to collapse entirely. Dozens of the Holy Roman Empire's most elite lords and knights plunged straight through the first floor and directly into the monastery's massive, festering cesspool located in the basement. Approximately sixty distinguished nobles brutally drowned in literal human feces that day, while the king only survived because he happened to be sitting in a stone alcove that did not give way. Frankly, it remains the most accurate physical representation of high-society politics ever recorded in human history
