Erfurt latrine disaster

Henry VI, then the King of Germany, was conducting a Hoftag with local nobility on the second floor of a building.

A land dispute between Landgrave Louis III of Thuringia and Archbishop Conrad of Mainz, which had existed since the defeat of Henry the Lion, intensified to the point where the Holy Roman Emperor and his family were forced to intervene.

On his father Frederick I Barbarossa's orders, eighteen-year-old Henry VI diverted from his military campaign en route to Poland to travel to Erfurt and mediate the situation.

[7][8] Henry VI and Archbishop Conrad were sitting in a stone window alcove and avoided the fall; they hung on until rescuers with ladders were able to arrive and let them down.

[10] His colorful retelling refers to the Hoftag as a Reichstag, sets it at the Benedictine Monastery of Saints Peter and Paul in the Petersberg Citadel, and says it sat atop a sewer instead of a cesspit.