The Mouse Tower (Mäuseturm) is a stone tower on a small island in the Rhine, outside Bingen am Rhein, Germany.
During a famine in 974 the poor people were without food, and Hatto, having all the grain stored up in his barns, used his monopoly to sell it at such a high price that most could not afford any.
The peasants were getting angry and organizing to rebel, so Hatto devised a cruel trick. He promised to feed the hungry people and told them to go to an empty barn and wait for him to come with food. The peasants were overjoyed and praised Hatto heartily, and all of them traveled to the barn to await his coming. When he arrived with his servants, he ordered the barn's doors shut and locked, then set the barn on fire and burned the peasants to death, derisively commenting on their death cries with the words "Hear the mice squeak!" (This quote exists in several slight variations.)
When Hatto retired to his castle, he was instantly besieged by an army of mice. He fled the swarm and took a boat across the river to his tower, hoping that the mice could not swim. The mice followed him and rushed into the river by the thousands. Many of them drowned, but even more crawled onto the island. There, they ate through the tower's doors and crawled up to the top floor, where they found Hatto and ate him alive.
They whetted their teeth against the stones,
And then they picked the Bishop's bones;
They gnawed the flesh from every limb
For They were sent to punish him!
The "Mouse Tower" story about a cruel ruler has been told about numerous rulers, but this is the most famous version. An allusion to this tale can be found in the poem "The Children's Hour" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
They almost devour me with kisses,
Their arms about me entwine,
Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine
Aachen Cathedral, frequently referred to as the "Imperial Cathedral" (in German: Kaiserdom), is a Roman Catholic church in Aachen, Germany. The church is the oldest cathedral in northern Europe and was known as the "Royal Church of St. Mary at Aachen" during the Middle Ages. For 595 years, from 936 to 1531, the Aachen chapel was the church of coronation for 30 German kings and 12 queens.
It was built under the reign of Charlemagne .
The Burg Griffen is a castle on a 130m/427ft-high limestone mountain above the town of Griffen in the Austrian state of Carinthia.
The castle was built between 1124 and 1146 by order of Bishop Otto of Bamberg. In a 1160 deed, Emperor Friedrich I mentioned Grivena as a Bamberg property.
Must be Mexico, central or south America...
