Blaž Hrvat, A Medieval Croatian Serial Killer and the Harsh World of 15th-Century Justice

Serial killers have always been part of human history, and fear of strangers has always been with us. Yet many cases go largely unmentioned, even when the killers are just as ruthless as the infamous names we all know.

In February of 1469, the people of Zagreb whispered about a tailor who had been taken by the authorities. His name was Blaž Hrvat, sometimes called Blaž Hrvat from Kamengrad. Almost nothing is known about his childhood, but by the time he reached manhood he was living off crime. When he was finally caught, the townspeople discovered they were looking at one of the earliest serial killers in Croatian history.

The first stories that emerged were shocking enough. Under torture, Blaž admitted to murdering a blacksmith named Antun from Hrastovica and Antun’s son. But the more the questioning went on, the longer his list of victims grew.

He confessed to killing his wife Margareta somewhere in the hills. He named Walyczu from Zrin as another he had dispatched. He spoke of a serf called Toma, owned by a landholder named Franychev. He admitted to cutting down an unnamed man in Pula and robbing him of money. He said he had killed another in Zadar, and even confessed to murdering a woman he had once loved, stripping her of coin after her final breath.

It was a trail of death driven by both anger and greed, and whether every confession was true or dragged from him under unbearable pain, the courts were satisfied. By the middle of the fifteenth century, torture had become a legitimate tool of justice, and men like Blaž rarely escaped alive once their secrets were forced into the open.

What awaited him was no quiet death. Medieval punishments were public theater, staged to terrify as much as to punish.

Criminals were humiliated in the stocks while villagers spat and jeered. They were lashed as they stumbled past their neighbors on whipping carousels. They lost ears or hands to the blade for theft or repeat crimes. Hangings filled the air with the sound of creaking rope. For the gravest sins, justice grew darker still. Some were drawn and quartered, their bodies scattered as warnings. Others, accused of witchcraft or heresy, were dragged to wooden stakes. The pyres lit the night sky as whole towns watched flames devour the condemned, smoke rising like a warning to anyone who dared stray from the path of obedience.

Though the exact record of Blaž Hrvat’s end does not survive, men who admitted to a string of murders seldom left the scaffold alive. Perhaps he felt the rope bite his neck, or perhaps he faced the roaring fire, bound to a stake while the crowd pressed close to see justice carried out. His story was not simply about one man’s violence but about the machinery of fear that ground on in medieval Europe.

In places like Zagreb, Zrin, or Pula, courts varied in form — royal for high crimes, manorial for petty disputes, and ecclesiastical for sins against the Church — but all had the same purpose. They existed to make examples. Even sanctuary within a church could not always protect the guilty, and exile was a mercy rarely granted.

Blaž Hrvat has been mostly forgotten, buried under centuries of history. Yet his case survives as one of the earliest glimpses into serial murder in Croatia, a reminder of how confessions torn from broken bodies and punishments designed as public terror shaped the justice of his age. Whether he ended beneath the rope or in the flames of a pyre, his name endured only because it revealed how violence and fear ruled the courts as much as the criminals themselves.