To celebrate past April Fools days, news publications have published fake stories and duped its audiences. (Breitbart, on the other hand, enjoys celebrating April Fool’s Day year-round).
In 1957, the BBC reported that farmers in Switzerland were having record harvests of spaghettis from their spaghetti trees. Last year, National Geographic sent out a news release that they would no longer be featuring animals without clothing because portraying them in the nude is degrading.
What started this curious holiday where people get to play tricks on one another?
It all started out in the spring of 1659 in what became known as the Second Crisis of Austrian Succession. So what happened was King Leopold II of the Habsburg empire died, and all of his kids were either inbred genetic train wrecks or illegitimate bastards (King Leopold was known to be a connoisseur of Vienna’s brothels).
And then all of a sudden, every other prince or duke from Alsace to Zläcdsyk announced that they had a claim to the throne. Even several bishops proclaimed that they were the rightful heirs.
As more and more leaders declared their intent on ruling the empire, their local subjects became more and more riled up over the political uncertainty they faced with several villages declaring pseudo-wars on each other.
The presiding regent over the Austrian Court, Franz Dietrich, did not know how to deal with this mess. So then he did something ridiculous.
Dietrich released a proclamation from the Austrian Court that all individuals claiming the throne were to come to the town of Wienerßdorf where they would convene a special meeting to determine who exactly would become the new emperor of the Habsburg Empire.
It is unclear how many local leaders took themselves seriously enough to heed the regent’s declaration but lower estimates put the number of people leaving for Wienerßdorf at 250. The thing is, Wienerßdorf is not a real town anywhere. A bunch of local princes and dukes packed up their bags and headed to somewhere that didn’t exist, and they had no idea.
Dietrich, at this time, ordered court messengers to head out to all of the towns and determine whether or not the local leader had left. If the leader had, the messenger was to announce to the local townspeople that their prince was selected to be emperor.
As towns across the Austrian countryside falsely celebrated their leader’s ascendancy to the throne, Dietrich also dispatched the Royal Guard to occupy major roads and kill any prince or duke they encountered.
In the ensuing power and information vacuum, Dietrich took advantage of the chaos and personally seized control over many of the unruled territories. Then things got really weird.
Dietrich posed as the Emperor to pass orders which would affect these localities. He did things like demanding that all households send a lock of a woman’s hair to the Habsburg court, legalizing marriage with animals and prohibiting the use of the word “undoubtedly” or “understüncken” in German.
However, over the course of several weeks, members of the court realized Dietrich’s trickery. They quickly had him arrested, and he had a horrific medieval death which I won’t describe in detail here because it is so graphic. (It involved rough goat tongues and open sores.)
Because all of this happened in the month of April, everyone who fell for the hoax became known as an “April Fool.” So that’s how we ended up with such a holiday. Every year, we set aside one day to commemorate how some random guy killed a bunch of princes and dukes and let some people marry their farm animals.
And as for the Habsburg empire, they ended up finding some long lost descendant of the royal line in Prussia to take over as Emperor.
Just kidding. I made that all up. April Fools’.
Apparently no one really knows the origins of this stupid holiday. The prevailing theory is that all of this nonsense started when some pope in the Middle Ages shifted the calendar around.
Or could that story could be an April Fools’ joke too? No one knows anything. As historian Will Durant put it, “History is mostly guessing, and the rest is prejudice.”
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