cahn | 18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 37

More 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!

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From:

mildred_of_midgard

Alas no. He also made off with some of the cash

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!

From:

selenak

No kidding. But if you think about it, it makes a gruesome kind of sense that the likes of Georg Hahn and Dorothea Flock get executed even though the Prince Bishop KNOWS there's intervention by higher authorities on their behalf. And no, not because he's that convinced of their witchery. These were influential people. Georg Hahn, ex-Chancellor, was the highest ranking Bamberg citizen to be burned, and as you see the Elector of Bavaria was willing to hire him. Dorothea was the daughter of a rich and influential Nuremberg family. If they had survived, they could not only have testified against the Prince Bishop and his commissioners (because even without the law of the time, which was massively unfair already from our pov, the way witch trials were conducted in Bamberg was full of blatant violations), they'd be listened to, AND they would have been in a position to demand reparations. They could have made actual trouble in a way which a poor woman or man could not have. Of course, their executions came back to bite Team Prince Bishop anyway, but he may have believed once they were irrevocably dead, their friends like Elector Maximilian would regretfully shrug and forget about it, especially with the Thirty Years War going on (where Catholic in-fighting wasn't wanted by the Emperor).

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.)

From:

cahn

This is just so, so awful. And yet like you say it makes a certain amount of evil sense. But uuuuugh! How caught up in your own madness do you have to be that hurrying up the execution of the mother of the newborn actually makes sense to you?!

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?

From:

selenak

But uuuuugh! How caught up in your own madness do you have to be that hurrying up the execution of the mother of the newborn actually makes sense to you?!

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.

From:

cahn

It's really as if everyone lost their collective minds/unleased their inner mass murderer, not stopping even with toddlers.

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.)