The knight who locks his wife in iron before riding to the Crusades is a complete historical illusion. This episode dismantles the medieval chastity belt, starting with the timeline: no credible evidence exists before the 15th century, over a hundred years after the last Middle Eastern crusade. The first blueprint appears in Konrad Kyeser's 1405 military manual Bellifortis, which historians like Massimo Polidoro and Eric Dingwall read as a satirical joke about the women of Florence, while earlier churchmen used the term purely as a spiritual metaphor.

We then follow the belts into 19th-century museums, where the Musee de Cluny, the British Museum and Nuremberg displayed forgeries attributed to Catherine de Medici and Anne of Austria until metallurgy exposed them as Victorian workshop products. The darker truth is that the 1800s were when re ...