He had locked up his wife and children for years. At that time, he himself enjoyed pleasure with young girls kidnapped from nearby villages, attacked merchants and passers-by with a group of faithful soldiers, and searched for a philosopher's stone in a private laboratory. We invite you to a journey into the dark mind of Marcin Mikołaj Radziwiłł - one of the most disgusting figures of the Saxon times.
Marcin Mikołaj was born in 1705 in the family of Jan Mikołaj Radziwiłł and Dorota Przebendowska. He inherited a great fortune from his father - he became one of the richest people in the Commonwealth (he owned such towns as Ostrów and Przygodzice). He was well educated. He knew Latin and Greek. He was passionate about alchemy and medicine.
Marcin Mikołaj Radziwiłł was one of the darkest figures of the Saxon times.
He was appointed by August III the Saxon as a steward in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. He was also a lieutenant general of the army of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and sat on the Lithuanian Tribunal as a marshal. The court in Lithuania, by analogy with the crown, was the court of appeal. He served as the second and last instance for civil cases settled in land, town, sub-maritime, commissioner and rally courts. He also dealt with criminal cases.
In short, Radziwiłł was a powerful and well-established person in a country ruled by the Saxons. Unfortunately - his assets, positions and prestige did not protect him from mental illness.
In the claws of insanity
Symptoms of psychosis were visible in the aristocrat as early as childhood, but they were fully revealed only in adulthood. It turned out that Mikołaj would not be a good owner of the estate he inherited from his father. He did not care for them completely. Even though he was fabulously wealthy, the estates and surroundings were poor.
He also had the right and the prestige of the positions he held for nothing. He felt unpunished, which was helped by the already weak state. Instead of acting like an aristocrat, he was acting more like a local warlord. The manor house in Czarnowczyce near Brest in Belarus served as a starting point for more and more bold inn and robberies which he liked. He attacked the surrounding manors, villages and travelers. He looted and burned without mercy.
It is possible that Marcin Mikołaj inherited a mental illness from his father, Jan Mikołaj.
His progressive insanity took its toll on his immediate surroundings. Paranoia confirmed the count's belief that an assassin was lurking among the servants and the family. This was one of the reasons why he began to surround himself with… Jews. It was also due to his fascination with their religion and the Talmud he was studying. He even decided to abandon Catholicism in favor of the Mosaic faith. One of Radziwiłł's closest trustees was a Jew named Szymon, who "generally ruled everything and did cruelty to many Christians."
In addition to the Talmud, Radziwiłł also explored secret knowledge. In the chambers of his castle he set up a "laboratory" in which he devoted himself to the search for the philosopher's stone. When he was finally imprisoned and incapacitated, rumors circulated among the locals that on your estate, in this mysterious room, Radziwiłł prepared human corpses.
He certainly did this with newborns who died in childbirth. It is known that the mad count sent prepared bodies and distillates from such children to Amsterdam. There they fell into the hands of Jewish sages and cabalists, with whom he conducted lively correspondence and with whom he consulted in connection with his own inquiries.
Harem of a pedophile
Another Radziwiłł's "pleasure" was the kidnapping and imprisonment of people. He could keep them in his castle for years. This was also the fate of his second wife, who bore him four children. Immersed in madness, the Count was unable to lead a normal family life. He arranged for the nearest hell on earth. He ordered the woman and the children to be locked in one of the chambers (without furniture and toilets), he set up a guard in front of the door, and he resided in the other part of the palace.
It's hard to even imagine the torments they had to go through. As the castellan of Brzeg-Lithuanian Marcin Matuszewicz reported in his memoirs: "the duchess and the little princes, her sons, were locked in great inconvenience and stench, because they had to sleep, eat and other nature's needs in one room" .
At the same time, the prince was delighted to indulge in sexual deviations. He wanted young, adolescent girls. All his entourage worked to fulfill the wishes of the noble lord, kidnapping, buying or simply taking away children from the surrounding villages by force. Younger children were also victims of it. Radziwiłł kidnapped and imprisoned them, waiting for them to mature so that he could force them to have sex (he called them the so-called cadets).
Coat of arms of Marcin Mikołaj Radziwiłł
When the deviant was finally knocked out, the scale of his lascivious activities was revealed. The count also did not shy away from fun in the arms of mature ladies. Many of them bore and gave birth to descendants of the cruel. Marcin Matuszewicz wrote:
They were asked how many had children with the prince and how she got into the seraglio (harem). Each one had to tell a story, how one was deceived, the other was stolen and raped, the third from parents, alias from mothers sold , and one was stolen by the priest Dawid Grodecki from his parents for two hundred ducats.
Entrance to Hell
Radziwiłł was not responsible for his actions for a long time. He got impunity for himself with bribery and cowardice. In the end, however, when a certain Grochowski, a thug and a companion of Radziwiłł was executed by the judgment of the court in Piotrków, the mighty family had to react somehow to the nobleman's excesses.
It was decided to temper him. his brother Hieronim Radziwiłł. In 1748, under the cover of night, with two hundred horsemen, he raided the court of the deranged count in Czarnowczyce. The man tried to defend himself, but didn't have time. The Jew, Szymon, was also captured with him.
The participants of the inn rushed deeper into the count's court. What they found stood on the head of a hair. After opening the room in which the prince had kept his wife and children under guard for years, they felt a terrible stench. They saw starved, extremely neglected, lousy people on the verge of insanity. A further search of Radziwiłł's property revealed the "harem" in which he kept the girls for love games, and the "laboratory" where he prepared the bodies. In a dark dungeon at the far end of the manor house, frightened children were also found, shaking with cold. They were "cadets" that were ultimately to be placed in the harem of the degenerate ...
The ancestral fortune and the anarchy of the Saxon times saved Radziwiłł from death. The Earl did not suffer formal punishment. But the one who imprisoned himself spent the rest of his life in prison. He lived under lock and key for over 30 years in a family estate in Biała Podlaska, and later in Słuck. He died on January 11, 1782.