The French King Who Believed He Was Made Of Glass

Charles VI, who ruled France from 1380 to 1422, was certain his body was made of glass. He lived in constant terror that the smallest bump would smash him to pieces.

To keep his supposedly fragile body safe, Charles had special reinforced clothing made. The idea was that extra padding would cushion him and stop him from breaking.

Charles was so afraid of shattering that he forbade his courtiers from coming near him, and modern retellings claim advisors were even told to approach him barefoot. It was that bad.

Sometimes the king flat-out refused to bathe for long stretches, worried that the process might fracture his “glassy” body. So on top of everything else, his delusion affected basic daily life in ways that made things harder for everyone around him.

Early in his reign, Charles was actually called “the well-beloved” for being generous and kind. He cared about ordinary French people and even welcomed non-aristocrats among his advisors. He was, by all accounts, a good and warm ruler at first. Not a hint of insanity… yet.

Fate was brutally unkind to Charles, though. His decades on the throne were some of the worst in French history. The Hundred Years’ War dragged on, France kept losing battles and land to England, and his people died in huge numbers from war and disease.

Charles’s mental struggles turned violent long before the glass delusion. In 1392, gripped by a sudden fit of rage and paranoia, he attacked and killed four of his own knights. The guilt of it reportedly haunted him for the rest of his life.

The year after the killings, disaster struck again. Charles and five friends dressed as “wild men” for a party, in costumes of flax soaked in pitch. When his brother, the Duke of Orléans, brought a torch too close, the costumes caught fire. But Charles had already stepped aside to talk with his aunt, who threw her skirts over him to keep him safe. Four of the other five burned to death, and only one saved himself by jumping into a vat of wine.

That deadly costume fire earned the name ‘Bal des Ardents,’ or the Dance of the Burning Men. As you would’ve guessed, this only deepened the king’s torment and pushed him to further instability.

Charles, heartbreakingly so, went from being “the well-beloved” to being “the mad” by the time he died. A devastating fall from grace, as they like to say.

Charles wasn’t the only one who had the glass delusion though. Between the 1400s and 1600s, a whole rash of “glass men” popped up across Europe. They were convinced that various parts of their bodies were made of glass, eerily similar to what Charles went through.

One poor man was so convinced his buttocks were made of glass and that sitting down would shatter them into flying shards. He was terrified to even leave his house. As sad as it was, I can’t help but chuckle at how ridiculous a misfortune that is!

The man who feared his glass buttocks also worried that if he went outside, a glazier, a glassworker, might catch him and melt him down into a windowpane. You could say it was a pane in the… backside.

Not every glass man feared shattering. One traveled all the way to Murano, the Italian island famous for its beautiful glassware, hoping to throw himself into a kiln and be reborn as a goblet. Sometimes you just gotta gamble on yourself, right?

There was also one scholar who was convinced that the entire surface of the world was made of glass, with a writhing tangle of serpents hiding just underneath it. You have flat earthers and then you have glass earthers, apparently. He refused to leave his bed, terrified that one wrong move would crack the world and drop him into the snakes.

Medieval doctors had their own explanation, and it’s a doozy. They believed health depended on balancing four bodily “humors,” and that too much “black bile” caused a condition called melancholia. In the heat of the body, this bile supposedly took on a glassy sheen. So in their minds, the delusion literally came from glass-like fluid inside you.

Melancholia was thought to be the special curse of scholars, poets, and philosophers, but also the very source of their brilliance. So the same condition that could make you believe you were glass was also linked to deep intelligence and creativity.

There may be a clever reason the delusion took this specific form. Back then, clear glass was a fairly new material, and people saw it as almost magical, even alchemical. Historians suggest the anxious mind latched onto the most mysterious, cutting-edge substance of the age. Basically, people’s fears attached themselves to the shiny new technology. Sounds a tad bit familiar?

In the 1800s, “cement delusions” appeared right as cement became a big new building material. It’s the same thing at present, in which many are convinced that secret agencies are reading their thoughts through tiny transmitters, or even their phones! If we talk about the many trivial fears that people have today over modern tech, we’re gonna have an endless list, but you get the point.

There are still cases of this glass delusion, though. There’s a case in which a man could apparently make himself feel “here” and “not there,” like he’s flipping a switch that makes him reappear and disappear. This man was a victim of a recent accident, though, and his family had become smothering, so this delusion may have been a coping mechanism for him to carve out space and privacy.

This content was created with the help of AI.