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cahnMore diaries of our favorite 18th-century Prussian diary-keeper have been unearthed and have been synopsized!
January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!
January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!
Re: Mayor Junius
Date: 2022-08-14 05:09 pm (UTC)I live close enough to Salem these days that I would have gone to see the museums by now, if not for the pandemic. One day! (At least it wasn't 1/8th of the population killed, I still can hardly conceive of that!)
Re: Mayor Junius
Date: 2022-08-15 01:02 pm (UTC)“Es sei weltbekannt und werde wohl aus dem, zu Regensburg überreichten, Verzeichniss aller Eingefangenen Bericht darüber erstattet worden sein, wie blutgierig, unchristlich und unbarmherzig die fürstlich Bambergischen Hexen-Commissäre in so kurzer Zeit eine so grosse Menge von sechshundert Personen, vornehme und geringe, junge und alte, mit Schwert und Feuer, unter Einziehung ihres Vermögens, ohne ordentliche Rechtsprechung, in Folge eines verwirrten Processes hätten hinrichten lassen.
Die hochbedrängten armen Leute, welche gegenwärtig den kaiserlichen Schutz anriefen, seien theilweise ein, zwei und drei Jahre an den genannten Orten, mit harten, schweren Banden und Ketten, unschuldig eingeschlossen, des Sonnen-Lichtes beraubt und, abgesehen von Hunger und Durst, harrten sie, nach Erduldung verschiedenartiger Folterqualen, im grössten Elend geduldig und standhaft aus, um ihre Unschuld zu beweisen.
Bis zur Stunde müssten sie - Gott möge sich darüber erbarmen! - ohne allen menschlichen Trost, oder Hoffnung auf Erlösung armselig leben. Deshalb seien sie genöthigt, dem Kaiser, als dem Vater aller Armen und dem Oberhaupt der Christenheit, ihre höchste Beschwerde, Angst und Nothlage vorzutragen, welcher in seiner Gerechtigkeit sie nicht trostlos lassen werde. Um der Bande Jesu Christi willen flehten sie die kaiserliche Majestät an, dass von derselben den bezeichneten Hexen-Commissären bei strenger Strafe befohlen werde, die wegen angeblicher Hexerei Gefangenen, die meistentheils wohlvermögend, unter Bürgschaftsleistung mit Hab und Gut, aus solch ungeheuerlichem, abscheulichem Gefängniss und solcher, durch Würmer und Ungeziefer drohenden Todesgefahr zu entlassen und ihnen zu gestatten, dass ein Rechtsanwalt vor einer unparteiischen Commission ihre Unschuld ans Licht bringe.
Für den Fall, dass in Folge rechter Untersuchung ihres Handels und Wandels, sowohl vor, als nach ihrer schweren Gefangenschaft, etwas Erhebliches wider sie mit Wahrheit erwiesen werden sollte, verpflichteten sie sich, wie es billig sei, sich vor Gericht zu stellen. Durch Gewährung dieser Bitte erweise der Kaiser die Gerechtigkeit, wie der Liebe Gottes und des Nächsten einen grossen Dienst. Die armen Gefangenen aber würden ihre Dankbarkeit durch inbrünstiges Gebet für seine zeitliche nnd ewige Wohlfahrt erzeigen.”
Emperor Ferdinand among other things forbade the way the fortune of the accused was just kept by the Prince Bishop. Which, wouldn't you know, suddenly reduced the number of accusations. By the time the Swedes entered the town, there were still some left in the prison specifically built for the "witches", though, which were then freed.
Re: Mayor Junius
Date: 2022-08-16 04:51 am (UTC)Ouuuuch. I'm glad he was able to put a stop to it :(
Re: Mayor Junius
Date: 2022-08-16 09:51 pm (UTC)Omgggg. I had no idea. Well, no WONDER the rash of accusations hit the more prosperous classes as well, aka "die meistentheils wohlvermögend." "You won't get off even if you're an earl." You won't get off ESPECIALLY if you're an earl, I see!
I don't suppose this was applied retroactively and the Prince Bishop had to give up the property he'd already confiscated?
Witch Trials of Bamberg
Date: 2022-08-17 07:03 am (UTC)The other main culprit of that particular persecution wave, his sidekick Förner (who was the Weihbischof to Fuchs von Dornheim's Fürstbischof), had died a bit earlier than that, but not before between the two of them, they brought so many people to death. Förner was the one delivering the ideological foundation, so to speak, via his writings and preaching long before 1626. He also was a hardcore counter reformationist whose ideas of how to re Catholize the country included trying to starve Nuremberg (which was the larger city but belonged to the Bamberg bishopry, except by then it had already turned Lutheran, big time), and was most put out when being told besieging, sanctioning and starving Nuremberg really could not be done. This wiki article delivers a pretty good summary of how the witch trials started proceeded and ended. A good illustration of just how in-their-own-world the terror regime got is the case of Dorothea Flock, who was pregnant when denounced, arrested and tortured (this was against the Carolina, the legal code established during the reign of Charles V., which forgabe the torture of pregnant women), and when her husband managed to get an actual papal intervention for her - on April 20th, 1630, Pope Urban issued a decree in her favor in Rome - the Bamberg witch commissioners upon learning a papal decision was coming instead expedited her death sentence (by then her baby had been born) and had her executed on May 17th. Similarly, chancellor Georg Haan's attempt to stop the witch trials by denouncing the Prince Bishop to the Imperial diet instead resulted in nearly his entire family (including himself) getting wiped out, more here. Of course, the fact that there was a brutal long term war going on and accordingly central control of individual German realms was shaky at best didn't help.
Re: Witch Trials of Bamberg
Date: 2022-08-19 04:44 pm (UTC)Yeah, I figured retroactive reparations would be too much to ask. I am pleased to hear he died in 1632, at least! Those are some ill-gotten gains indeed.
the Bamberg witch commissioners upon learning a papal decision was coming instead expedited her death sentence
WTF??!! *speechless rage*
attempt to stop the witch trials by denouncing the Prince Bishop to the Imperial diet instead resulted in nearly his entire family (including himself) getting wiped out, more here.
To avoid an arrest, Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria attempted to save him by offering to employ him, but the messenger he sent to Bamberg to deliver this news was prevented from reaching the city.
ZOMG, this story keeps getting worse!
Re: Witch Trials of Bamberg
Date: 2022-08-20 01:26 pm (UTC)Now, whether Fuchs von Bornhelm (the evil Prince Bishop) would have had to face serious consequences if he'd lived longer, who knows. Sadly, I can't think of an example of someone in charge of witch persecutions to such a degree had to face even a little bit of justice for it later. (In neighboring Würzburg, where a similarly large scale wave of mass executions was going on at the same time, these only ended when their prince bishop died.) This really is a gigantic blood bath of an era as far as the German speaking territories were concerned, and that's why the docu drama miniseries Age of Iron impressed me so much by finding rl characters to follow who experienced tragedies but more or less made it out of the era alive and with some degree of happiness, like Peter Hagedorn. One of said characters, as a reminder, was the innkeeper Barbara Gsell, and the reason why we know a lot about her and her life during the war was that she was denounced as a witch, interrogated, tortured, but as one of the very very few NOT condemned to death but released again. I should have figured out that she'd be the character through which the series personalizes and illustrates the witch craze, but despite some build up - in earlier episodes, Barbara is nice to the town executioner when he visits her inn when everyone else is shunning him for social reasons and doesn't want to be seen near him, and this pays off in the episode where she gets arrested - it didn't dawn on me until the episode itself. (She didn't live in Bamberg, though. In Franconia, but not in Bamberg or Würzburg, which may have contributed to saving her life.)
Re: Witch Trials of Bamberg
Date: 2022-08-23 04:14 am (UTC)You say that not living in Bamberg may have contributed to saving her life -- is this because she wouldn't have been denounced by anyone from Bamberg? What else might have contributed to her being released instead of condemned?
Re: Witch Trials of Bamberg
Date: 2022-08-23 07:12 am (UTC)Quite, and as caught up, I suppose, as executing children. This was less a feature in Bamberg, where I think the youngest executed were 14 years old teenagers (though I could be wrong about this), and more in Würzburg at the same time, where the Chancellor of the Würzburg Prince Bishop wrote about the ongoing trials to a friend: To conclude this wretched matter, there are children of three and four years, to the number of three hundred, who are said to have had intercourse with the Devil. I have seen put to death children of seven, promising students of ten, twelve, fourteen, and fifteen. Of the nobles--but I cannot and must not write more of this misery. There are persons of yet higher rank, whom you know, and would marvel to hear of, nay, would scarcely believe it; let justice be done . . .
It's really as if everyone lost their collective minds/unleased their inner mass murderer, not stopping even with toddlers.
Barbara Gsell(er) (I've seen both versions of her name): well, first of all, she was one of the very few people tortured who did not confess under torture. This wasn't impossible, but it very rarely happened, for obvious reasons. Now, the Carolina, the laws as instituted by Charles V., say that if you don't confess under torture, torture is not allowed to be repeated, you have cleared yourself, God is obviously on your side. The way not just the Bamberg witch commissionaries but most of them got around this prohibition to repeat torture was by declaring the torturing hadn't been finished, only interrupted, and what was going on was still the original one and only torture session, with interruptions. BUT in the case of Barbara Gseller, who was accused by the local midwife (who'd been the previously tortured accused) in the late summer of 1648, the city council of Biberach (her hometown, where as the owner of a very popular innn she was a wealthy and respected citizen) decided to consult the legal scholars of the university of Ingolstadt as to whether continuing the torture was permissable or whether she had cleared herself by not confessing, and the Ingolstadt guys decided in her favor. Note another difference to the way witch trials were conducted in Bamberg between 1626 - 1631: because the Emperor in 1631 in no uncertain terms had said that keeping the money of the accused was a practice that was to stop and was illegal, the Biberach city council didn't have Barbara's wealth to gain by keeping up with the torture. And of course Team Prince Bishop of Bamberg wouldn't have dreamt of consulting an outside authority as to the legalities, on the contrary, it were the people trying to stop the proceedings who did that by petitioning the Imperial diet, the Emperor and the Pope.
I also wouldn't exclude the possibility that there were enough people in the city council in Biberach in 1648 who remembered how things had gone down in Bamberg and Würzburg twenty years earlier, how many people had died and how just about everyone of any age and station could be denounced as a witch, and thus decided to use the case of Barbara Gseller to put an end to the accused/torture/new denouncements/new torture/new accused/ etc chain.
Re: Witch Trials of Bamberg
Date: 2022-08-26 05:30 am (UTC)Oh noooooo. Like Mildred says, it just gets worse and worse!
the city council of Biberach (her hometown, where as the owner of a very popular innn she was a wealthy and respected citizen) decided to consult the legal scholars of the university of Ingolstadt as to whether continuing the torture was permissable or whether she had cleared herself by not confessing, and the Ingolstadt guys decided in her favor.
Oh yay! But also, of course, fascinating as to the differences that you note re: the lack of monetary motivation and the remembrance of what had happened before. People, man.
(But also, the logic about the torture session, aaaaaack.)
Re: Mayor Junius
Date: 2022-08-16 04:50 am (UTC)Yes, this! Wow!