define the word. What is relevant? Not history, according to the more radical critics. Who cares what happened in ancient Babylon or medieval England? It’s now that counts.
They couldn’t be more wrong. Everything has happened before – not once, but over and over again. We may not be able to solve our problems through what are pompously called ‘the lessons of history,’ but at least we should be able to recognize the issues and perhaps avoid some of the solutions that have failed in the past. And we can take heart in our own dilemma by realizing that other people in other times have survived worse.
Social upheaval and revolution are old issues, as old as society itself. The Peasants’ Revolt, in the southern and western provinces of Germany, is not one of the better-known revolutions, but it has some interesting parallels with our own times. The peasants are always revolting, says the old joke. It’s a sick old joke. The peasants had plenty to revolt about. There had been many rebellions, by groups driven to desperation by conditions that make modern slums look like Shangri-La, but in the sixteenth century social discontent and misery found a focus. The focus was a real rebel – a renegade monk who called the Pope bad names and loudly proclaimed the abuses of the Establishment. He even married an ex-nun, whom his bad example had seduced from her vows. His name was Martin Luther
Although his teachings gave the malcontents a mystique, Luther was against violence. ‘No insurrection is ever right, whatever the cause.’ And, in the crude style which was typical of the man at times, ‘A rebel is not worth answering with arguments, for he does not accept them. The answer for such mouths is a fist that brings blood to the nose.’
The autocratic princes of the rebellious provinces agreed with both comments. Many of them approved of Luther’s attacks on the Church, since that institution restrained their local powers, but they definitely did not like complaints from their ungrateful subjects. They applied the fist to the nose. The Peasants’ Revolt was savagely suppressed by the nobles and the high clergy, many of whom were temporal princes as well as bishops of the church.
Today the province of Franconia is one of the loveliest parts of Germany. Beautiful old towns preserve their medieval walls, their Renaissance houses and Gothic churches. It’s hard to imagine these quaint old streets as scenes of violence, and yet this region was the centre of the rebellion; blood literally flowed like water down the paved gutters. The city of Wurzburg, with its lordly fortress looming over the town, was the seat of a prince-bishop whose subjects rose up and besieged him in his own castle. Another centre of revolt was Rothenburg, now the most famous of the medieval cities of Germany.
I visited Rothenburg on a summer tour one year and promptly fell in love with it. Among its numerous attractions is a castle – Schloss Drachenstein, the home of the Counts von und zu Drachenstein. Although I admit to a sneaking weakness for such outmoded relics of romanticism, I was not collecting castles that summer. It was one of those coincidences, which Tony and other romantics like to think of as Fate, that Tony had spent a summer doing the same thing I did. We were both in search of Tilman Riemenschneider.
A sculptor and woodcarver, Riemenschneider was probably Germany’s greatest master of the late Gothic. The tomb sculptures and altarpieces he created are concentrated in the area around his home town of Wurzburg, where for many years he served as a councillor. At the time of the Peasants’ Revolt he was an elderly man, prosperous and honoured – a good, respectable member of the Establishment. It wouldn’t have been surprising if he had supported the Church which had commissioned many of his works, and shaken his greying locks over the depravity of the rebels. Instead, he joined his fellow councillors in support of the peasants’ cause. When the rebellion was suppressed, he ended up in the bishop’s dungeon; and although he came out of it alive and lived for six more years, he never again worked with his hands. The altar at Maidbronn, finished in 1525, was his last work.
Yet there were tantalizing references to another work by Riemenschneider, which had vanished during the turmoil of the revolt. A reliquary, or shrine, it incorporated three great jewels that had been ‘liberated’ from the Saracens by a Count of Drachenstein. According to an old chronicle, the shrine had been commissioned by a descendant of this nobleman in the early fifteen hundreds.
Art historians derided this tradition. No trace of the reliquary had ever been found, and there was no mention of it except in the monkish chronicle – a species of literature which is not noted for factual accuracy. I never gave the story a second thought – until that winter afternoon when I found myself translating the letter of a Count of Drachenstein, written at a time when Riemenschneider was a prisoner in the dungeons of the Bishop of Wurzburg.
I sat there with the fire warm on my back, holding the book with fingers that had gone a little numb. The room faded from my sight, and the uneven patter of Tony’s typewriter went unheard. I was seeing another century and hearing other voices.
The old man.
Riemenschneider was born in 1455. He would be seventy years old in 1525. He had been imprisoned, and tortured – ‘put to the question,’ as the pretty euphemism of the day had it.
I glanced at Tony, who was still hunched over his typing. Without looking up he threw down the book he had finished, and groped for another. I slid the remaining volume into his hand. He muttered an absent word of thanks and went on working; and I returned to
There were two more letters from Count Burckhardt of Drachenstein. He had been one of the knights called up by the Bishop of Wurzburg when that worthy’s subjects got out of hand. Not all the knights fought against the peasants. Gotz von Berlichingen, the romantic robber knight known as Gotz of the Iron Hand, had led a group of rebels from Odenwald. True, he maintained later that he had been forced into this action, and an imperial court acquitted him of treason. One is justified in being cynical about both the avowal and the acquittal.
For Burckhardt von und zu Drachenstein, radical chic had no appeal. He marched out to defend the status quo and the Church. His description of the siege, where he had wielded his battle-axe with bloody effect, made me wince, not so much because of the descriptions of lopped-off heads and split carcasses as because of the tone in which they were couched. He counted bodies the way kids count the stamps in their collections.
The clincher came in the third letter.
The glittering vision that had taken shape in my imagination faded, to be replaced by another picture, equally vivid and far less appealing. My imagination is excellent, and it had plenty of information to work with; in my naive youth I had visited several torture museums, before it occurred to me that my subsequent nightmares might have some connection with the grisly exhibits. You don’t forget things like that – ugly things like thumbscrews and the rack, the iron boot that crushed flesh and bone, the black metal shape of the Maiden, with her sickly archaic smile. I could see the old man in my mind’s eye too. There is a self-portrait of Riemenschneider on the altar-piece he did for the church at Creglingen. His face is jowly and a little plump in that carving. It wouldn’t have been plump after a few weeks in the bishop’s prison. It would have been emaciated and smeared with filth, like his ageing body – marred by festering rat-bites and the marks of pincer, awl, and fire. Oh, yes, I could see the whole thing only too clearly, and I could see Burckhardt standing by, cheering the torturers on. One of the great creative artists of his century, gloated over by a lout whose skull was as thick as his armour – who couldn’t even write his own name.
I worked myself into such a state of rage and horror that I made a fatal mistake. I didn’t feel Tony’s breath on the back of my neck until he let it out in a windy gasp.
Clutching the book to my bosom, I turned my head. My forehead hit Tony on the nose. A blow on that appendage hurts; it maddens the victim. Holding his nose with one hand, Tony grabbed with the other. Instinctively
