I can't resist mentioning this again and it is a nice round number this time : 840 years ago today
On July 26th in 1184 around sixty attendees at a political conference in Erfurt died when the floor collapsed and they fell into the cesspit in the basement. They drowned in excrement.
The Erfurt Latrine Disaster or Erfurter Latrinensturz happened when the soon-to-be Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, as King of Germany, convened all the nobles he could to mediate a feud between an Archbishop and a Landgrave. Too many people were in the room for the floor to handle, and it gave out. Many Counts and Burgmeisters died; Henry VI survived because he was seated on a stone part of the structure instead of the wooden floor.
Perhaps God saved Henry VI because He wanted to move Sicily into the Holy Roman Empire? Or maybe he was an entertaining speaker?
Forum questions so often come up about whether a place is worth more than a day or half-day, and I always think that if the traveler would just do a little digging around they would find nearly endless things of interest about those places.
Even an event that proves to be a stain on a town's history, as this one was, is still history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfurt_latrine_disaster
Does this come up when you're looking around the sights in Erfurt?