The Third Horseman

by William Rosen

  In 1341, Pope Benedict XII issued a papal bull announcing a memorial service for 8,100 named citizens of the city of Erfurt who had perished in the famine twenty-five years before.

  As the “great hunger” of 1315 was succeeded, in the words of the chroniclers, by a “great mortality” in 1316, the northern parts of the Holy Roman Empire became victims of epidemic disease on the heels of the famine. One chronicler observed that, with no food to be had, “within one day the infected”—probably from typhus—“began to fade.” The use of broths made from imported fish or beans caused even more distress in people with kwashiorkor, who can’t digest protein-rich foods; the Chronicle of Sigismund Rositz recalled that people given such soups often died of strangulation or choking.

  A mother could comfort her children with a nightly prayer, a priest could offer his villagers the sacraments or a bishop lead a town in a barefoot procession, all in an attempt to enlist the power of a God who had seemingly abandoned them. And when the orthodox responses failed—as they inevitably did—there was always heresy. One sect in Germany, whose doctrine included an objection to the necessity of priestly confession, was accused of worshiping the devil, practicing incest, and attacking the Virgin Mary; hundreds were condemned to burn during 1315–1318. Another sect, which followed the so-called heresy of the free spirit, were charged not only of religious crimes but, perversely enough, with what the authorities of the city of Strasbourg termed “unauthorized” begging—that is, seeking alms while dressed in clothes that could be mistaken for religious dress. They lasted long enough to earn the name Brot durch Gott (“for God’s sake”), which was the phrase that preceded their cries for help.

  The fourteenth century was cruel enough even before the famine years began. When starvation becomes an everyday phenomenon, year after year, it doesn’t just exhaust a people’s strength, it destroys their compassion as well.

  • • •

  The terrible years of hunger and pestilence were still in the future when the double election of 1314 ignited war in central Europe. The war had started, like preceding disputes over the imperial crown, as a relatively low-intensity affair: no more than a few thousand taking the field against one another, and often only hundreds. The impact, however, was magnified by its context: notoriously bad weather and widespread, durable famine. Out-of-the-ordinary weather and food shortages meant that even a low-intensity war between Ludwig and Friedrich could destroy a significant fraction of German armed might, and an even more significant fraction of German agriculture.

  Some benefitted, as is always the case. The Cistercians of the German-speaking parts of the Holy Roman Empire dominated the salt trade, profiting hugely from the run-up in salt prices in 1315–1317. The bishop of Metz made more from salt than from rents in one year, and the nuns of Kloster Ebstorf near Lüneberg in north Germany controlled both salt production and, through connections with the Hanseatic city of Lübeck, its transport, as well.

  Most of the ecclesiastical and secular lords, however, suffered. The only imperial support for any local problem was granted for reasons of tactical advantage, rather than need; the hospitals founded by Ludwig IV in 1317 (in Amberg) and 1319 (in Ingolstadt) were selected to keep their towns loyal—and resistant to the entreaties of Friedrich of Austria. The town of Haguenau was granted privileges by Friedrich in order to win its support away from Ludwig, who had done the same.

  Understandably, then, German towns were prone to sell their support to one party or another. Strasbourg essentially ran an auction for its support in 1315; when Ludwig offered a series of privileges, Friedrich counteroffered. Ludwig then sweetened his bid, which prompted Friedrich to improve his—an expensive game for the imperial aspirants, and a dangerous one for the Strasbourgers, as victorious princes have a way of punishing what they tend to view as treason.

  The war for the imperial throne never became as deadly as the equivalent conflicts in France because, though the German-speaking areas of northern Europe were subject to precisely the same demographic pressures and climate changes as everywhere else, they reacted to them very differently. The passions that fueled the wars between Robert Bruce and Edward of England, or between France and Flanders, did not figure as large in the struggles of the Holy Roman Empire. For historical reasons—the way the Carolingian Empire divided itself; the absence of a conqueror in the mold of Duke William of Normandy; papal strategy—nationalism was late in coming to the German-speaking world, and so, therefore, were battles for national identity.

  Even so, the war between Ludwig and Friedrich featured one notable exception: a battle at a mountain pass near Lake Lucerne that gave birth to a nation.

  Sometime around 1307, as Robert Bruce was reigniting his rebellion in Scotland, representatives of three forest “cantons”—Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden—bound themselves together with an oath: the Rütlischwur, named for the meadow where, in legend, at least, it was born. The oath added an emotional coda to a Letter of Alliance, signed in August 1291, that had already formed an “eternal,” autonomous unit within the empire that recognized no sovereign other than the emperor himself.* Switzerland was born.

  At the time of the Rütlischwur, the Austrian Habsburgs had been trying for more than a century to annex the territories of the cantons, particularly the Gotthard Pass, which was the shortest route between the German-speaking center of the empire and its rich provinces in northern Italy. When the double election offered the choice between a Wittelsbach and a Habsburg, the confederacy didn’t have to think very hard before supporting Ludwig’s claim. In early 1315, that support turned violent: the Schwyz raided a monastery that was under the protection of the Habsburgs. Duke Leopold of Habsburg, younger brother of Friedrich, thought it a perfect time for a strategic invasion toward the Gotthard Pass and, by the way, an opportunity to destroy the obstreperous confederation.

  The great twentieth-century military historian Hans Delbrück noted, picturesquely, that both the invasion specifically, and the struggle for Swiss independence generally, are “buried beneath a mass of rubble made of legends and fables” that are widely known to a dozen generations of children, not all of them Swiss. Most famous of all is the tale of William (or Wilhelm) Tell, the steadfast peasant with uncanny skill with a crossbow, who, failing to salute the cap of the Austrian governor Hermann Gessler, was forced to shoot at the legendary apple set atop his son’s head. As a model for the reluctant warrior, peaceful but resolute, Tell has few equals.

  The reality, as it often is, was more complicated. Tell and his confederates were wily guerrilla fighters, and their war against the Habsburgs not “a desperate revolutionary rising of a peaceful peasantry but rather a well-planned struggle of a warlike community with battle-hardened leaders.” Long before their intentionally provocative attack on the Habsburg-protected monastery, Schwyz troops had set up elaborate obstacles along the only roads possible through their mountain valleys. These letzinen—of which nearly a hundred survive today—were intended to channel invading cavalry on to ground where the advantage shifted from armored knights to well-drilled infantry.

  So when Duke Leopold, brother of Friedrich, led his two thousand knights and three thousand infantry along the east bank of Lake Aegeri, he found that the Schwyzers had built a roadblock of tree trunks and boulders along the main road, which forced the column onto the narrow Morgarten path. There, on November 15, 1315, Leopold found still more roadblocks, and, on the heights above the pass, fifteen hundred armed infantry.* Led by the semi-legendary Schwyz leader Werner Stauffacher, the Swiss sprang their trap. Smaller space meant no room for the mounted Austrians to maneuver, and the Schwyzers, along with men from Uri and Unterwalden, were able to fight downhill, armed with the voulge (a Swiss version of the Lochaber ax, a halberd with a spear point, with an ax on one side, and a hook for pulling knights from their horses on the other) and morningstars: spiked clubs.

  It was another Stirling Bridge or Bannockburn. Or, even more accur
ately, another Courtrai, since the Swiss, like the Flemings, had no delusions about any chivalric brotherhood with their opponents and therefore took no prisoners. At least two thousand Austrians died, no more than a hundred Swiss. The monk Johannes of Winterthur, who wrote his own recollection of the battle twenty-five years after the fact, recalled that Duke Leopold seemed not just “greatly sad, but half-dead.” His sorrow was understandable; the Swiss confederacy retained its stubborn independence, over the next century adding cities like Lucerne, Zurich, and Bern, and regularly defeating Habsburg incursions. Though the modern country of Switzerland wasn’t formally founded until 1848, its independence as an autonomous nation would never be seriously in question after Morgarten.

  The name of the next Holy Roman Emperor took a bit longer to decide. Over the course of the next seven years—the same seven during which “Germania” suffered through the lost harvests of 1315 and 1316; successive plagues of sheep, goats, and horses; and the horrific winters of 1318–19 and 1321–22—Ludwig and Friedrich fought one indecisive battle after another, usually, as with Morgarten, through proxies.

  In September 1322, the two aspiring emperors finally met, though the exhausted “armies” they led barely deserved the name. Friedrich invaded Bavaria, hoping to lure Ludwig into defending his own duchy. He led only fourteen hundred knights, plus another five hundred or so mounted Hungarian archers. Ludwig commanded only eighteen hundred knights. Evidently Friedrich’s plan had been to link up with another force led by his younger brother, Leopold, and trap Ludwig; but, in an age in which armies didn’t even have reliable timepieces, much less communication, coordinating such maneuvers was a chancy proposition. When the Austrians and Hungarians met Ludwig’s army at the Bavarian city of Mühldorf, on the River Inn, Leopold had not yet arrived. Even so, Friedrich decided not to wait but to force the action (in at least one dubious legend, he is said to have mused, “This war has already caused enough widows”). Even more dubiously, he did so by dividing his forces—never a good idea—sending his archers across the Inn River, where the Nuremberg knights destroyed the unprotected Hungarians. Ludwig had been given an overwhelming numerical advantage, and he used it to win a decisive battle against Friedrich, taking him, and up to one thousand of the Austrian knights, prisoner. Leopold escaped.

  The victory at Mühldorf freed Leopold to turn his attention to another adversary: Pope John XXII. John, like his predecessor, Clement V, had claimed a right not merely to approve the elevation of the King of the Germans to the title of Holy Roman Emperor, but even his authority as king: a prerogative that Ludwig found more than objectionable. When Ludwig sent an army into Italy in 1323, putatively to defend the imperial city of Milan from the Kingdom of Naples, Pope John, still fighting for the principle that papal authority trumped secular power, excommunicated him. Ludwig responded by deposing him on grounds of heresy, thus proving the principle’s flaw: secular powers had troops with which to enforce their commands. He then seated a friendly replacement in the chair of Saint Peter (Pietro Rainalducci, retrospectively the antipope Nicholas V), instigating what some modern historians call the “final struggle” between emperor and pope.

  The political consequences of seven years of civil war and famine in German-speaking Europe were dramatic and significant: the decline of papal influence, the emergence of the Habsburgs, and the birth of what would become a federal Swiss state. But it may be that the most durable heritage of the years 1315–1322 was literary: tales based on real events have endured long after those events are forgotten.

  One such tale survives to the present as a powerful folk memory in Germany, known there as the story of the Mouse Tower of Bingen. As the story goes, Bishop Hatto of the Rhineland city of Bingen was so avaricious that he denied the people of his town access to the granaries. Worse, he forced them to fill these granaries even as the famine deepened. When the bishop finally responded to his townspeople’s entreaties, he did so by locking them in an empty granary and burning them alive. But a flood of mice would emerge from the embers, and, well . . .

  He beat them off by the score; he trampled them under his feet; he tore at them savagely with his hands—all to no purpose; he might just as well have tried to beat back the ocean. The rats surged against him like waves breaking on a cliff, and very soon the Bishop was overwhelmed in the horrid flood. Little was left to tell of the tragedy when his servants plucked up courage to enter the building some days later.

  Even outside of Germany, any child will recognize another story of the famine years from its opening lines:

  Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor wood-cutter with his wife and his two children. The boy was called Hansel and the girl Gretel. He had little to bite and to break, and once when great dearth fell on the land, he could no longer procure even daily bread.

  Stories involving cannibalism are one of famine’s most reliable companions. The presence of a witch in this particular one—and, not at all coincidentally, a dark forest, evoking a deep folk memory of the great woodlands that, centuries before, had covered most of Europe and whose destruction was one of the markers of the Medieval Warm Period—offers, like all enduring stories, a way of making sense of what would otherwise be senseless: children starving for a crust of bread.

  Another of the Grimms’ tales dating from the Great Famine is so dark that it is regularly excluded even from collections untroubled by the harshness of the punishments visited, for example, on Cinderella’s stepsisters. Generally known as the “Story of Children Living in a Time of Famine,” it goes something like this:

  Once upon a time there was a woman with two daughters, so poor that they lacked even a crust of bread. So poor were they that the mother despaired, telling her older daughter, “I shall be forced to kill you so I will have something to eat.”

  To which her older daughter said, “Dear mother, please spare me, and I will find something for us to eat, without begging.” And she did, returning with a piece of bread. She shared it with her mother and sister, but they were still hungry.

  So the mother said to her younger daughter, “Now, I shall be forced to kill you so I will have something to eat.”

  To which her younger daughter said, “Dear mother, please spare me, and I will find something for us to eat, and no one will be the wiser.” And she did, returning with two pieces of bread. She shared them with her mother and sister, but they were still hungry. So the mother said to both her daughters, “I shall be forced to kill you, or all of us will die.”

  To which both daughters said, “Dear mother, please spare us, and we will lie down and sleep, and never awake until Judgment Day.” And they did, sleeping so soundly that they never did awaken. And their mother left, and not a soul knows where she is.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Long Years of Havoc”

  1323–1328

  In 1322, Robert the Bruce defeated Edward II for the last time, and Edward finally removed the threat from the earl of Lancaster. In the same year, Philip V of France died, and with him the Flemish War. The number of claimants to the throne of the Holy Roman Emperor was cut in half after Ludwig’s victory over Friedrich at Mühldorf.

  It was also the last year of the Great Famine.

  The trials and tribulations of Edward II, however, continued. In the summer of 1323, Roger Mortimer escaped from his prison in the Tower of London. The bishop of Hereford, Adam Orleton, who was both a key ally of the queen and a longtime supporter of the Mortimers, enlisted two Londoners, Richard de Bettoyne and John de Gisors, to smuggle liquor and a rope ladder into the apartment where Mortimer was confined. The Marcher Lord extended an offer of hospitality to his jailers, and proceeded to drink them insensible; he was then escorted by another member of the conspiracy, Gerard d’Alspaye, the deputy constable of the tower, through the kitchens, where he used the ladder to descend the outside of the tower to the bank of the Thames. There, Orleton had thoughtfully arranged for a boat and supplies to be waiting, and M
ortimer was halfway to France, apparently, before his guards awakened.

  France meant freedom, not least because the current relationship between Edward and Charles IV, never especially congenial, was now near open warfare over Gascony. The Gascons were, by feudal custom, subjects of the English king but were nonetheless obliged by French law to air their grievances in the Parlement of Paris. By summer of 1323, dozens of those complaints were pending, and one—a dispute between two of Edward’s vassals in Gascony—was resolved by the simple expedient of executing the one most defiant of Charles IV’s authority. This was a violation of Edward’s feudal rights, and a clear provocation. To further vex Edward, in the fall Charles built a fortified town around the priory of Saint-Sardos—technically French territory, since it was a fief of the Benedictine abbey at Sarlat, and, through the chain of hierarchy, to the king of France. However, since Saint-Sardos was part of Aquitaine, it was therefore also technically Edward’s possession, and subject to the English king. In November, Sir Ralph Basset, Edward’s seneschal—the English king’s representative in Aquitaine—attacked the fortified town, burned it, and hanged a French soldier on a gallows decorated with the arms of the French king. Charles then called the offending seneschal to trial, and when Sir Basset failed to appear, declared that his absence forfeited Saint-Sardos to the French Crown.