More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 26 - December 31, 2024
Despite his repeated exposure to the entire gamut of human cruelty and his own regular administering of horrific violence, this apparently genuinely religious man seems never to waver in his belief in ultimate forgiveness and redemption for those who seek it.
A father who does not arrange for his son to receive the best education at the earliest age is neither a man himself nor has any fellowship with human nature. —Desiderius Erasmus, “On the Education of Children” (1529)1
Fear and anxiety are woven into the very fabric of human existence. In that sense they link all of us across the centuries.
This thirst for war coincided with a steady decline in the number of nonmilitary jobs available to commoners during an exceptionally long period of inflation and high unemployment that historians have dubbed the long sixteenth century (c. 1480–1620).
One contemporary characterized landsknechts as “a new order of soulless people [who] have no respect for honor or justice [and practice] whoring, adultery, rape, gluttony, drunkenness … stealing, robbing, and murder,” and who live “entirely in the power of the devil, who pulls them about wherever he wants.”
The specter of witchcraft hovered menacingly throughout Frantz Schmidt’s lifetime, often leading to the tragic real-world consequences we know today as the European witch craze of 1550–1650, during which at least sixty thousand people were executed for the crime.
The teachings of Martin Luther and other Protestants from the 1520s on repudiated any reliance on “superstitious” protection rituals, but otherwise reinforced the common belief in a moral universe where nothing happened by chance.
an audacious dream of social ascent that was virtually unthinkable in their rigidly caste-conscious world.
The Hof of his childhood and adolescence remained a closed society of at most one thousand people, its insularity and social rigidity exacerbated by its remote location. Later known as the Bavarian Siberia, the region surrounding the town on the Saale River was wrapped in dense, ancient forests and overshadowed by mountains up to one thousand meters high. Long, brutal winters and a native soil riddled with chalk and iron made farming difficult. Weaving and other cloth-related trades dominated economic life in the town, cattle- and sheepherding in the countryside. Mining had provided another
...more
Upon Albrecht’s death in 1557, his cousin Georg Friedrich, margrave of neighboring Brandenburg-Ansbach, assumed control over Brandenburg-Kulmbach as well. Hof’s new lord was as steady and circumspect as his kinsman had been rash. All the city’s trees miraculously bloomed again that fall, reported the local chronicler Enoch Widman, as potent an omen as the earthquake that had presaged Albrecht’s disastrous rampage.
In 1572 its bishops had enjoyed four centuries of simultaneous secular and religious authority and, despite considerable losses to the Protestant Reformation during the previous four decades, still ruled over four thousand square miles of territory and approximately 150,000 subjects.
To discourage criminals from returning to crime, the Carolina prescribed an ascending scale of punishment: public flogging for a first offense, banishment for a second offense, and in the event that an exiled offender returned and was convicted of a third offense, execution.
“If there were no criminals, there would also be no executioners,” Martin Luther preached, adding, “The hand that wields the sword and strangles is thus no longer man’s hand but God’s hand, and not the man but God hangs, breaks on the wheel, beheads, strangles, and makes war.”
Another legal scholar compared the disgust directed at the executioner’s task to the shame associated with excretion—both distasteful but necessary parts of God’s plan.
Typically, each sword carried a unique inscription, such as “Through justice will the land prosper and thrive; in lawlessness it will not survive,” or “Guard thyself from evil deeds, else thy path to the gallows leads,” or, more succinctly, “The lords prosecute, I execute.”60
Did the young journeyman’s ambition override his innate distaste for his unsavory work, or did he find other ways to make the job more palatable? Above all, how would he keep the near daily violence he administered from consuming him?
This stratagem of recalling and recording the heinous offenses that had made necessary the very punishments he carried out was a useful discovery that provided continual reassurance to Frantz throughout his long career.
Everywhere that Frantz went, he encountered the dominant culture of unmarried males—whether honest journeymen like himself or those engaged in shadowy enterprises—a social world based primarily on drink, women, and sport. Alcohol in particular constituted a key component of male friendship in early modern Germany and held special significance in the rites of passage among young men.
This crucial semblance of moderation and due process is particularly helpful in understanding how an otherwise empathetic, intelligent, and pious individual might make peace with his role in routinely perpetrating the abominable personal violation that is torture.
The religiously charged atmosphere of the day also added a particular urgency to the legal process, since it was believed that unpunished offenses might bring down divine wrath on an entire community (Landstraffe), in the form of flood, famine, or pestilence.
One early-twentieth-century German historian considered the criminal justice of this period to be typified by “the cruelest and most thoughtless punishments imaginable,” but in fact a great amount of thought—specifically about the appropriate level of cruelty or ritualized violence—went into every form and instance of punishment.39
A technically proficient and reliable executioner was himself the very embodiment of the sword of justice in action—swift, unwavering, deadly, but never appearing susceptible to arbitrary or gratuitous cruelty.
“What’s good comes from Nuremberg” had become a popular adage throughout the empire and abroad, giving the city a level of brand prestige that would be the envy of any modern chamber of commerce.7
For most people of the era, one’s reputation was inextricably bound up in one’s identity, and much of that identity was inherited, including place of origin and social status.
There were surely few respectable social or work opportunities for women once their nicknames were revealed to be Playbunny, Furry Kathy, Grinder Girl, or, most jarring, Cunt Annie.45
After all, as he well knew, not all evildoers got caught or punished and not all victims were completely blameless in their own misfortunes. Satisfactory performance of his duty, moreover, did not demand any passion for justice or profound belief in the righteousness of his daily work.
The restraint that Frantz shows when he deals with sodomy shouldn’t be interpreted to mean that homosexual activity was either widespread or generally condoned in Meister Frantz’s Nuremberg. The severe clerical injunctions against such “abominations” and their cosmic repurcussions remain, however, notably absent in Schmidt’s writing.
Like most people, Meister Frantz appeared to be uncertain whether nature or nurture exerts more influence in the development of children who become career criminals. Clearly he didn’t consider lack of access to respectable craft training—a fact of life for him and his own children—to be an acceptable explanation for why a young man might turn to crime.
Schmidt’s insistence on personal accountability did not make him oblivious to the apparently innate origin of some bad character.
He said that Hörnlein told him he had cut off many babies’ hands during his travels and successfully used the “little fingers” as candles during break-ins, “so that no one awoke.” (In England this practice was known as the Hand of Glory.)3
What???
Drinking blood, “the noblest of the humors,” was considered an especially potent remedy with many uses, among them dissolving blood clots, protecting a patient from painful spleen or coughing, preventing seizures, opening up blocked menstruation, or even curing flatulence.28
The healing power of mummy, as preserved human flesh was generically known, even became the focus of a new devotional mysticism devised by the Jesuit Bernard Caesius (1599–1630).
Artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo had long before requested the bodies of the executioner’s victims for this purpose—decreed permissible by Pope Sixtus IV in 1482—but the medical interest in dissection did not really take off until the publication of Andreas Vesalius’s remarkable drawings in De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Concerning the Construction of the Human Body; 1543).
In popular folklore, executioners and their magical swords (drenched in the blood of recently executed young men) could prevail against vampires and werewolves as well as summon spirits of the dead or exorcise ghosts from houses.
Southern Germany in fact saw more executions for witchcraft than any other region in Europe—perhaps 40 percent of the grand total of sixty thousand—and Franconia in particular was ground zero of the witch craze, most infamously as site of the Bamberg and Würzburg panics of 1626–31 that resulted in the executions of more than two thousand people.46
Without modern investigative capabilities, modern technology, and modern alternatives to banishment (i.e., prison), the legal authorities of Frantz Schmidt’s day felt compelled to rely on self-incrimination and torture as well as capital punishment for a variety of serious and recidivist offenses.
