The Burgermeister's Daughter: Scandal in a Sixteenth-Century German Town

U R G E R M E l S T E R' S

DAUGHTER

ENTURY GERMAN TOWN

SCANDAL IN A SIXTEENTH-CENTURY

by Steven Ozment. All rights reserved. [ca. No part of this book may be used or er without written permission except in l in critical articles or reviews. For infor5 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. 1553) "Justice as a Naked Woman with , Fridart Stichting. Cranach was the most ful German painter of his time, perhaps es, and especially portraits, made him an ful cultural figure, court-painter for the d ally of Martin Luther and the Refor528), who admired and painted Cranach, eel him, but not by much. For the most tm, et al., Lucas Cranach. Ein Maler;, 1994), pp. 19-27,347-348. Widmann, Hallischer Chronick SA Hall commanded the heights bordering the lay the market-village of Unterlimpurg, irectly beneath), home of the Schenks' !d Church of Mary, since 1283 the parish ile Schauenburg's center. The large house ll house, on the boundary between LimJrg to the city in 1541, all of these prop'he lords of the Schauenburg, however, ation. ias Merian, Schwabisch Hall, Stadtarchiv

OS

To MY DEAR MOTHER SHIRLEY

M. EDGAR

I WILL BE AS HARSH AS TRUTH AND AS UNCOMPROMISING AS JUSTICE.

-William Lloyd Garrison, 1831

THE B'ORGERMEISTER'S DAUGHTER: SCANDAL IN A SIXTEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN TOWN. Copyright © 1996 by Steven Ozment. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No pan of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Manin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. Front cover: Lucas Cranach's (1472-1553) "Justice as a Naked Woman with Sword and Scales," 1537. Amsterdam, Fridan Stichting. Cranach was the most productive and economically successful German painter of his time, perhaps of all time. His altars, woodcuts, nudes, and especially portraits, made him an influential political as well as powerful cultural figure, court-painter for the Saxon princes and lifelong friend and ally of Martin Luther and the Reformation. Only Albrecht Durer (1471-1528), who admired and painted Cranach, was deemed by contemporaries to excel him, but not by much. For the most up-to-date account, see Claus Grimm, et al., Lucas Cranach. Ein MalerUnternehmer aus Franken (Augsburg, 1994), pp. 19-27, 347-348. Back cover: Castle Limpurg. Georg Widmann, Hallischer Chronick SA Hall (HV II/8, fol. 8r). Castle Limpurg commanded the heights bordering the southeastern wall of Hall. At its foot lay the market-village of Unterlimpurg, which embraced the Schauenburg (directly beneath), home of the Schenks' noble retinue and servants. The steepled Church of Mary, since 1283 the parish church of the Schenks, can be seen at the Schauenburg's center. The large house (center left) was once the Limpurg toll house, on the boundary between Limpurg and Hall. With the sale of Limpurg to the city in 1541, all of these properties were incorporated into Hall. The lords of the Schauenburg, however, continued to enjoy freedom from taxation. Title-page spread (background): Mathias Merian, Schwabisch Hall, Stadtarchiv Schwabisch Hall BS 193. DESIGN BY BARBARA M. BACHMAN MAP ON P. 7 BY MARK STEIN STUDIOS Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ozment, Steven E. The biirgermeister's daughter : scandal in a sixteenth-century German town I Steven Ozment. p. em. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-312-13939-X 1. Biischler, Anna, ca. 1496-1552. 2. Women-Germany-Schwabisch Hall-Biography. 3. Schwabisch Hall (Germany)-Social conditions. 4. Fathers-Germany-Schwabisch Hall-History. 5. Courts-Germany-Schwabisch Hall-History. 6. Schwabisch Hall (Germany)Social life and customs. 7. Women-History-Middle Ages, 5001500. 8. Social history-Medieval, 500-1500. I. Title. DD901.$3652096 1996 95-40408 943'.471031'092-dc20 [B] CIP FIRST EDITION: MARCH 1996 10987654321

To MY DEAR MOTHER SHIRLEY

M. EDGAR

I WILL BE AS HARSH AS TRUTH AND AS UNCOMPROMISING AS JUSTICE.

-William Lloyd Garrison, 1831

CONTENTS

L i st o f I ll u s t r a t i o n s

·xi

One . The Story

Two .

The Affairs

Three . On the Run Four . , Five . Siblings Six . Witnesses Seven . The Moral 185 Notes

195

Appendix: Biograph i c a !IG en e a l o g.i c a! Essay 221 Ack.n.owledgments Index

224

225

About the Author

228

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Chapter One 1. Junker (Young Nobleman) and a Maiden: CREDIT: H. S. Beham, in Max Geisberg, The German Single-:;Leaf Woodcut: 15001550, I, rev. & ed. by Walter L. Strauss (Hacker Art Books Inc., New York, N.Y., 1974), p. 135. 2. Schwabisch Hall and its Surroundings. CREDIT: Govind Sreenivasan.

Chapter Two von Limpurg, Erasmus'

Schenk Georg I Grandfather. CREDIT: Rainer J ooss. Kloster Komburg im Mittelalter. 2. iiberar b ei tete und erwei terte A uflage (Jan Thor b ecke Verlag: Sigmaringen, 1987).

3.

4. Letter of Schenk Erasmus of Limpurg, With Handdrawn Hearts. CREDIT: Hauptstaatarchiv Stuttgart, C3 Bii 529 L32/125a.

5.

Chapter Three Biischler House on Market Square. CREDIT: Stad tarchiv Hall.

6.

Chapter Four Lindenhof. CREDIT: Mathias Beer.

Chapter Five 7. The Coats of Arms of Schwabisch Hall, Philip Biischler, and Agatha Biischler Schanz. In St. Michael's Church. CREDIT: Steven Ozment. Chapter Six Conrad Biischler, the Younger, Anna's Curator. CREDIT: Schwabisch Hall. 8.

Chapter Seven Grieving Mary. In Hallisch-Frankisches Museum. CREDIT: Steven Ozment. 9.

t"''ungril~ bid) got b11 fi'rl'llnbtlicl)e tinbf. Got ban,r r111b JPncfl)cr wae!Ja6t lr irn f1"n• .l!ic6t Jonlffran> lalf rnid) ~~~ m:>r 2\ofcn fd)mcc:fm. f.1C'ftrrt~crfc!1m• C5iltr~:~~ozt foil man nit ~crfcbmc!1cn.

CHAPTER

ONE

BUDDING

ROMANCE

Th God greets you, dear, kind girl. God thanks you, junker. What's on your mind? Dear maiden, let me smell your roses. Dear junker, they do not grow in every thicket. Dear maiden, if I had a garden such as yours, I would tend it oh so diligently. Dear junker, not everyone may go in there; To enter, you must first pray constantly. So you continue to make yourself worthy. Kind words shall not be spurned.

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ON jANUARY 27, 1552, IN THE COURTHOUSE OF THE CENTURIESold south German imperial city of Schwabisch Hall, a notorious case of parental brutality and denial of family inheritance abruptly ended with the announcement of the death of the plaintiff, Anna Sparland, born Anna Biischler (1496/98-1552). Anna was, at her death, in her mid-fifties and had spent fully half her life, since 1525, battling her father, siblings, and city hall. She died impoverished and embittered between the testimonies of the penultimate and the last witness-the biirgermeister of distant Rothenberg, who was her first cousin, and the biirgermeister of Hall, who led the opposition to her. 1 To the end, she held the spotlight in the internal politics and life drama of Hall. 2 In the early 1520s, Anna Biischler seemed destined to a prosperous and serene life, not one of interminable personal and legal conflict. Born into a highly respectable family, confident and exuberant in her youth, and a woman of acknowledged beauty, she had a reputation as the belle of her hometown, and as something of a free spirit. But the center of attention could also be a perilous place in the sixteenth century, and those who put themselves in it flirted with danger. Both men and women were then expected to adhere to clearly defined standards of behavior specific to gender, social class, and contemporary community values. On such conformity were social order and civic peace seen to hang. Character and reputation accordingly carried great weight in legal proceedings, which judged present behavior in light of past, carefully examining a person's life from every angle. Anna was peculiarly vulnerable to such scrutiny. Both in her late teens and in her twenties, she had behaved in a manner scandalous to the society in which she lived. Her story is one of multiple collapsing relationships: between a daughter and a father, a sister and her siblings, a servant and her mistress, a woman and her lovers, a citizen and her town. Twice, in original and unforgettable ways, she brought shame and embarrassment to her family and the city of Hall: the first time, when she deceived her father and incurred his undying wrath, the sec-

ond, twenty years later, when she defied the city council and provoked its retaliation. The whole disputed record of her "scandalous, undisciplined, and reprehensible life"3 has survived largely intact, thanks to the undying animus of her father and her brother. It is because of their actions that we have the unusual testimony to the events in question of dozens of her fellow citizens and well-positioned outside observers, taken decades later by the imperial court. And her father and brother were the ones who discovered, confiscated, and preserved the extremely rare cache of her love letters-not with one, but with two men-by which her character was impeached before the same court. What exactly had this woman done to cause her father, then biirgermeister, to denounce her as "an evil serpent" and the government of Hall to declare her a renegade, and in both instances to draw the intervention of the imperial supreme court, Germany's highest? Why did the behavior of one woman rivet the attention and disrupt the lives of so many important people for so long a time? The answers to those questions lie in the internal workings of ·a distant society and in the inner lives of people who were both like and unlike ourselves. Our story is set in northern Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century, when the age of chivalry had passed and the creative period of the Italian Renaissance was nearing its climax. Rome would be tragically sacked and looted by imperial soldiers, many of them German mercenaries, in 1527. But already in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the comparatively ordered medieval world of knights, priests, and peasants had begun to give way to the more adventurous world of nouveau riche merchants, zealous religious reformers, and politically ambitious artisan guilds in the economically and culturally ascendant urban centers. The Black Death, which peaked in 1349 and especially ravaged the cities and towns along the major overland trade routes, ironically helped tip the balance of power from the landed nobility in the countryside to the new bourgeoisie in the cities. In the wake of the plague's devastation, thousands of peasants bought, or simply declared, their freedom from their landlords and departed for the cities, where skilled hands were more in demand and better paid than on the waning manors. In the recovering cities, the immigrants found good jobs in urban

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R G ERM EIST ER ' S

D AUGHT ER

industries, and increasingly became part of a confident new lay world created by another revolution in these same centuries. Between 1300 and 1500, the number of universities more than tripled across Europe, and the opportunities for vernacular secular education multiplied as well to meet the need for educated personnel in urban businesses and governments. The printing press became a reality because of the new multitudes of literate laity. A scant fifty years after Johann Gutenberg, bankrolled by his father-in-law, had opened his print shop in Mainz (in the 1440s), two hundred presses were in operation across Europe, sixty of them in Germany alone. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, these various forces had created a bourgeoisie more knowledgeable about and involved in their world than ever before, and ready to challenge both the old nobility and the old Church for control of their lives. 4 Nowhere was such lay self-confidence bolder than in Germany, the site of our story. Emperor Maxmilian I (1493-1519) attested the new unruly spirit of the age when, in a famous comparison of his rule in the Holy Roman Empire with that of the kings of Spain and France in their lands, he described himself as a "king of kings." In Spain, subjects both obeyed and disobeyed their king, as one might expect them to do, while in (rival) France, contrary to expectations, they did the king's bidding without question, behaving more like animals than humans. But in the empire, where Germany was the crown jewel, people did just as they pleased, as if each were a king! 5 The 1520s were Germany's most revolutionary decade before modern times. In these years, the Protestant Reformation, led by Martin Luther, captured the imagination of people in scores of German cities and towns, including Hall. Charging the Church of Rome with spiritual deceit and tyranny, the Reformation divided families, universities, and city governments alike, as region after region was forced to choose between the old religion and the new. Amid resentments that would flame up in a near century of religious conflict, Protestants demolished shrines, emptied and secularized cloisters, forbade the Mass and other sacraments, permitted the clergy to marry and subjected them to taxation, and conceded lay magistrates-no longer the clergy-the last word in moral and domestic affairs. The Church of Rome was not the only traditional institution at this time to incur the wrath of revolutionaries. The years 1524-25 saw tens

The

Story

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of thousands of peasants revolt in the countrysides of southern and central Germany, as they challenged their masters' greed and exploitation. A number of peasant leaders invoked Luther's teaching to justify such action, as the new spiritual egalitarianism of the Reformation gave a spur to social revolution. But Luther soon condemned the peasants for mixing religion and politics, and powerful noble armies, both Catholic and Protestant, suppressed the rebellious peasants everywhere, killing tens of thousands. Scholars today argue whether these two great events in German history-the Reformation and the Peasants' War-really liberated anyone. The near consensus is that the 1520s were truly a dark, not an enlightened decade, and these events created new forms of bondage for all save a privileged few. Removing the counterweight of the papacy, the Reformation seemed to concede absolute political authority to the German J?dnces and ruling elites, while the Peasants' War gave these same rule~s a pretext for crushing the common man as well. 6 These same years are also viewed today as a low point in the history of women. Whereas the centuries between 1300 and 1500 had been something of a golden age for women-their educational and vocational opportunities increased, and with them their civic freedom-the sixteenth century turned back the clock. Women were again squeezed out of the guilds and public places and increasingly confined to the home-a reversal of fortunes for which some scholars have held the patriarchal ideals of Protestant reformers especially responsible? Like many other comparable towns in this age of religious reform and social revolution, Hall had both a successful Lutheran reformation and a failed peasants' revolt, in one or both of which, characters in our story played a role. And its "star," Anna Buschler, could certainly attest to the difficulties of being a woman in the sixteenth century. Her story is also one of revolt against deceit, tyranny, and exploitation, but on a smaller scale and in a different dimension. Set in a medium-sized but central imperial city, and revolving around a single prominent family, her story, too, measures an age as well as its protagonist. As one person's quest for justice and equity in an uncharitable age, Anna Buschler' s "revolt" may have something in common with the revolutionary movements of the 1520s. Certainly the odds against her succeeding against the traditional authorities in her life were as great as those that faced the religious and social revolutionaries. And whether

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A U GH T ER

in the end she, like them, can be said really to have won anything is a question the reader must decide in light of the evidence. Finally, as a provocative tale about the primordial forces of human nature, our story could not have a more appropriate setting than the ancient town of Hall. The city and its environs have been described as "the classic land of the history of the earth," a reference to its unique geography and geological history.8 The Celts first settled the area in the fifth century B.C., building a village near the great salt spring around which the town of Hall would subsequently grow; in the 1940s, excavations uncovered the remains of the original village. Although older than the Celts, the name "Hall" derives from them and is closely connected etymologically with "salt," Hall being from the beginning the great