Does this story sound familiar to anyone? I heard it told on the car radio last week and have tried googling to print out and let my husband read, but am having no luck.
I don’t know whether these were real or fictional historical characters…
There was mention of “Newkirk”…
There was a very obese king (Ranulf?) whose brother overthrew him and had workmen build a room around Ranulf. There was a window up high and an unbarred door, however, the door was made slightly smaller than normal.
Every day the brother had platters filled with succulent, tempting foods.
Instead of losing weight and walking to freedom, Ranulf only grew larger and remained prisoner for 10 years until the brother’s death. By that time, Ranulf’s health was so poor, he lived only one year.
When asked if he wasn’t being cruel, the brother had replied, No, Ranulf was free to leave his prison anytime he chose.
I’m inclined to say the brother’s name was Richard, because I remember thinking, there sure were a lot of Richards in history…
No definitive answer I’m afraid. But I will say that I’m at least fairly certain that said character is fictional. Or at the very least apocryphal. It’s a pretty fanciful tale and I can’t think of any Ranulfs or Richards that I can match up with it.
It sounds like a fable of some sort, and it is familiar but I can’t place it.
King Farouk of Egypt is the closest name I can think of to Ranulf that belonged to an obese deposed king, but Farouk (who abdicated in favor of his infant son when overthrown by Nasser) wasn’t under house arrest. He actually dropped dead from obesity related heart failure following a gigantic meal in a French restaurant in Rome at the age of 45; I’ve read, unconfirmed, that Mr. Creosote, the diner who dies from “one wafer thin mint”, was based on him . (Most of the images of him are from when he was young and relatively trim or of idealized portraits of him in later years as he didn’t like cameras when he ballooned, but here’s a picof him entering a Paris nightclub in his fat exile years.)
I’ve never seen Michael Palin’s Jabberwocky, but isn’t there a morbidly obese nobleman in that movie? I may be thinking of another.
In the book of Judges, the king of the Moabites isEglon, a king so obese that he barely noticed when stabbed with a sword. It’s possible there is extrabiblical accounting of him as well.
ETA: Wikipedia’s list of famous Ranulfs. I didn’t read them all, but I didn’t see any mentioning obesity.
PPS- King Louis VI, “Louis the Fat”, was huge and had a half brother (Philip, Count of Nantes) who attempted to depose him, unsuccessfully. It’s possible that the legend was born of a medieval reworking of this.
There was also Constantine VIII, the Byzantine Emperor, who was co-emperor with his brother Basil the Bulgar Slayer. (I’ve researched his daughter Zoe, the empress who made her boy toy emperor for a time after they did in her first husband, and made some posts about her.) Anyway, Constantine was hugely obese and debauched with his male and female concubines* while his brother Basil did most of the ruling and actually, per legend anyway, saw to it that his brother had a never ending supply of delicacies and bed partners so that he wouldn’t take more of an interest in ruling. (In the Byzantine Empire, death certificates could have come with one space for both “cause of death” and “next of kin”, so it wasn’t a bad idea, especially since his brother was technically as much the emperor as Basil [“the Bulgar Slayer”, though more famous for blinding than slaying them]. Costa survived his brother by a few years and hated ruling, basically finding someone (the general Romanus) to do it for him and marrying him to his middle aged daughter Zoe.
While not exactly the same as the legend in the OP, you can see how in retelling it could become that legend. “Keep the true king happy and housebound while you rule in his stead”- win win.
*ETA: To deprive possible nitpickers of the joy, a male sex toy is technically not a concubine but a concubitor.
She fascinates me in part because as a young woman she was also very likely the intended bride of young Otto III, the western emperor ( he died while she, or one of her sisters if it wasn’t her, was enroute to their marriage ). I’ve always wondered what the result of that union would have been, politically. It’s an intriguing “What If?”
Very. Had they married (“missed it by that much”) and had a son, if he’d been at all halfway competent as a ruler he’d have controlled as much of the world’s surface as Alexander/Charlemagne/Napoleon ever had, roughly from Turkey to the borders of France.
Very. I’ve always thought there’s a great novel waiting to be written about Zoe. A very hot one too, since her sexual awakening came as a well preserved middle aged adulteress with a teenaged studmuffin (i.e. Christine Baranski and Zac Efron are attached).
Closest I can come: Arnulf of Carinthia obtained his throne in 887 after deposing his uncle, Charles the Fat. Charles was not killed, but went off to exile in a village called Neidigen (not an awful lot like “Newkirk”, but … starts with an N!). Arnulf then reigned about a decade before his death in 899.
However:
Charles did not outlive him (in fact, lasted only a few months)
Charles was not boarded up in a house - it was a voluntary exile, since he couldn’t defeat Arnulf’s armies
Charles may or may not have actually been “fat”, as such.
Could be the historic basis for a later garbled legend though?
Likely wasn’t. The name was attached to him long after his death by non-contemporaries and was probably more due to his ( largely false, it seems ) reputation of being lazy and ineffectual.
Simon McLean has written a very effective defence of him ( though that is not the book’s primary purpose ) called Kingship and Politics in the Late Ninth Century:* Charles the Fat and the end of the Carolingian Empire* ( 2003, Cambridge University Press ).
I’ve heard this story, but it wasn’t about a king. Renaud III, Count of Guelders, was imprisoned in the castle of Nijenbeek by his brother Edward. He became so fat he could not leave even when the doors were left open. I’m trying to find a primary source for this, but all the books I can find on Google Books are in Dutch.
Renaud and Edward were grandsons of Edward II of England, by the way. Their mother was his daughter, Eleanor.
All the responding posts have been so interesting, in fact!
Thank you, everyone.
Now I can rest in peace.
BTW, acsenray, the parable was something about how we’re all easily held prisoner by our own weaknesses, if we’re not careful.
(And how easily it would be to be taken advantage of them by others.)
