Boring History For Sleep By The Snoritorian
Oct 15, 2026 · 1 hr 42 min · 14 segments
Inside the Medieval Brothel: Why You’d Not Make It to Morning We are live on Spotify Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/show/0mfM0Csl7Ste2OUsWTD07j YouTube: / @Snoritorian Facebook: /…
Foreign travelers who visited this city at the end of the 15th century wrote about its brothel with a mixture of astonishment, disapproval, and something close to admiration.
It was not a single house, they said.
but a small town of its own, enclosed by a wall, with streets, taverns and shops inside, hundreds of women and doctors paid by the city to examine them.
Nothing quite like it existed anywhere else they had been.
The date is an evening in October, in the year 1494.
Spain has just been transformed.
Two years ago, in January 1492, the armies of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile captured Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula.
That same year, the monarchs expelled every Jew who would not convert to Christianity from their kingdoms.
He has gone back again, with a great fleet, and nobody yet knows what he will find.
And that same year of wonders, 1492, a Valencian cardinal, Rodrigo de Borja, whom the Italians call Borgia, was elected pope as Alexander VI.
Valencia is very proud of him, whatever Rome may say.
You arrive by the road from the north, as the sun is sinking behind the hills, and the sky over the sea turns from gold to violet.
Valencia rises before you out of the Huerta, the fertile irrigated plain that surrounds it, a green checkerboard of fields, orchards and channels laid out centuries ago in the time of the Moors, still watered by an ancient system of canals and still governed by a water tribunal that meets every Thursday at the door of the cathedral.
Mulberry trees for the silkworms line the roads.
Rice grows in the wetlands to the south, around the great lagoon of the Albufeira.
The air smells of earth, water, wood smoke and, faintly, of the sea.
You enter the city through a great stone gateway flanked by two massive towers.
The Torres de Serranos, built about a century ago, the grandest of the city gates.
Inside, the streets are narrow, winding and crowded, a maze laid out in the time of the Moorish city, lined with tall houses, churches and convents, many of them built from the golden stone of the region.
Above the rooftops rises the octagonal bell tower of the cathedral, the Michaelet.
And near the market, the merchants of Valencia are raising a magnificent new building, the Locha de la Seda, the Silk Exchange, with its forest of twisted stone columns like palm trees, which will be finished in a few years' time and will still stand five centuries later.
Valencia, in 1494, is one of the great cities of the Mediterranean, with perhaps 70 or 80,000 people, richer and more populous than Barcelona.
It is the capital of the Kingdom of Valencia, one of the realms of the Crown of Aragon, and it speaks its own language, Valencian, a form of Catalan.
It is a city of merchants, silk weavers, sugar traders, bankers and craftsmen.
Foreign travelers who visited this city at the end of the 15th century wrote about its brothel with a mixture of astonishment, disapproval, and something close to admiration.
It was not a single house, they said.
but a small town of its own, enclosed by a wall, with streets, taverns and shops inside, hundreds of women and doctors paid by the city to examine them.
Nothing quite like it existed anywhere else they had been.
The date is an evening in October, in the year 1494.
Spain has just been transformed.
Two years ago, in January 1492, the armies of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile captured Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula.
That same year, the monarchs expelled every Jew who would not convert to Christianity from their kingdoms.
He has gone back again, with a great fleet, and nobody yet knows what he will find.
And that same year of wonders, 1492, a Valencian cardinal, Rodrigo de Borja, whom the Italians call Borgia, was elected pope as Alexander VI.
Valencia is very proud of him, whatever Rome may say.
You arrive by the road from the north, as the sun is sinking behind the hills, and the sky over the sea turns from gold to violet.
Valencia rises before you out of the Huerta, the fertile irrigated plain that surrounds it, a green checkerboard of fields, orchards and channels laid out centuries ago in the time of the Moors, still watered by an ancient system of canals and still governed by a water tribunal that meets every Thursday at the door of the cathedral.
Mulberry trees for the silkworms line the roads.
Rice grows in the wetlands to the south, around the great lagoon of the Albufeira.
The air smells of earth, water, wood smoke and, faintly, of the sea.
You enter the city through a great stone gateway flanked by two massive towers.
The Torres de Serranos, built about a century ago, the grandest of the city gates.
Inside, the streets are narrow, winding and crowded, a maze laid out in the time of the Moorish city, lined with tall houses, churches and convents, many of them built from the golden stone of the region.
Above the rooftops rises the octagonal bell tower of the cathedral, the Michaelet.
And near the market, the merchants of Valencia are raising a magnificent new building, the Locha de la Seda, the Silk Exchange, with its forest of twisted stone columns like palm trees, which will be finished in a few years' time and will still stand five centuries later.
Valencia, in 1494, is one of the great cities of the Mediterranean, with perhaps 70 or 80,000 people, richer and more populous than Barcelona.
It is the capital of the Kingdom of Valencia, one of the realms of the Crown of Aragon, and it speaks its own language, Valencian, a form of Catalan.
It is a city of merchants, silk weavers, sugar traders, bankers and craftsmen.
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