How Printing Changed the World

“We should note the force, effect, and consequences of inventions which are nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, namely printing, gunpowder and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and the state of the world.” wrote Francis Bacon in 1620. And almost everybody agreed.

Printing changed everything, but how exactly did it change everything? That is a question nobody posed properly until Elisabeth L. Eisenstein got on the academic stage in the 1970s and the debate has not yet stopped.

In this episode I will try to take you through some of Eisenstein’s ideas on the how of the change and, in the end, attempt a raincheck on what we can learn from it for the information revolution we are living through right now. No worries, this is still the History of the Germans, so we will talk facts and dates and processes, with only occasional attempts at breaking into the ivory tower…

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 188 – What Has Printing Ever Done For Us?, which is also episode 4 of season 11 – The Empire in the 15^th Century.

Quote: “We should note the force, effect, and consequences of inventions which are nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, namely printing, gunpowder and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and the state of the world.” wrote Francis Bacon in 1620. And almost everybody agreed.

Printing changed everything, but how exactly did it change everything? That is a question nobody posed properly until Elisabeth L. Eisenstein got on the academic stage in the 1970s and the debate has not yet stopped.

In this episode I will try to take you through some of Eisenstein’s ideas on the how of the change and, in the end, attempt a raincheck on what we can learn from it for the information revolution we are living through right now. No worries, this is still the History of the Germans, so we will talk facts and dates and processes, with only occasional attempts at breaking into the ivory tower…

But before we start, let me again press the point that the History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free, thanks to the support of our patrons. And you can become a patron too by signing up on my website HistoryoftheGermans.com/support and enjoy the warm glow of your fellow listeners appreciation. And special thanks go to: Christina K., Court Burkhart, James L., Mark Pearson, Dave G. and Dr. Volker Schulte who have already taken the plunge.

And with that, back to the show

Last week we ended on Gutenberg having published his famous bible in 42 lines of beautifully accurate letters. And we also heard that at that same point he lost his workshop to his financial backer, Johann Fust who hired Peter Schöffer, a former calligrapher and Gutenberg’s apprentice to run the print shop.

Gutenberg himself kept printing, though scholars keep getting into fierce debates about which book was printed by him, how and where it was printed. But what is undisputed is that the next really ground breaking book was published by Fust and Schöffer, The Mainz Psalter. Another exquisitely printed book that saw the first use of multiple colours, decorative initials and a colophon, the printer’s mark declaring who made it, when and sometimes why.

But Mainz was not the only place to boast a printing press. Already by 1457 Heinrich Eggerstein and Johannes Mentelin, apprentices of Gutenberg, opened a printing press in Strasburg. In 1458 a Frenchmen showed up in Mainz, sent by his king to do a bit of commercial espionage. In 1461 the Mainzer Stiftsfehde, the archbishops war, broke out and a year later the city was sacked. As a consequence, Gutenberg fled and opened up a new shop in Eltville, whilst Fust and Schöffer remained and after things had calmed down, continued printing.

But in the meantime, their associates and apprentices had set out to seek their fortunes elsewhere. There was already a printing workshop in Bamberg by 1459, in 1465 there is one in Cologne, Basel and Augsburg opened in 1468, Nurnberg in 1470 and by 1500 there were printers in 60 different German cities. And many cities had more than one printer, Strasburg for instance housed 50 printers by 1500.

And these German printing apprentices did not stay just in Germany. They spread all across Europe, founding workshops in Rome in 1460, Venice in 1469, Paris in 1470, Segovia in 1472, Budapest and Krakow in 1473, Leuven in 1474, London comparatively late in 1476, Odense in Denmark in 1482. The first printing shop in Africa was opened in Sao Tome and Principe in 1494 by a certain Valentin of Moravia.

Within 50 years a 1,000 printing businesses had opened all across Europe and had produced 15-20 million books, as many as had been produced by scribes in all the preceding centuries – not that anyone can prove that statement, but it sounds cool.

So it is boomtime and printing is going to grow in a straight line to today, when in the US alone about 700 million books are printed every year. No, nothing in the world grows in a straight line, not even new technologies. By 1500, the printing industry experienced a terrible bust.

Why?

Gutenberg’s ambition had been to print the best possible bible. What he meant by that was a bible that looked and felt very much like a medieval manuscript, just infinitely more consistent, precise and legible than any monk in his scriptorium could ever achieve.

And who were these books made for? Well, the same clientele who bought books before, the church and the great princes. A bible, like the Gutenberg Bible of 1454 or the Mainz Psalter of 1457 were far too expensive to be bought by a country parson. They were made for bishops and abbots. And then we have the huge bibliophiles of the 14^th and 15^th century, king Wencelaus the Lazy and the duke of Berry, brother of the French king. These collectors had commissioned some of the most breathtaking illuminated manuscripts, like a spectacular copy of the Golden Bull complete with birds and bathing girls.

And then you have the Tres riches Heures of the Duc de Berry, probably the apotheosis of illuminated manuscripts, images you will recognise instantly. There was no way printers could match this kind of mastery, and in fact they haven’t even ‘til today.  

Books like these were luxury objects and their owners used them as status symbols. But owning a full bible or psalter stopped being such a status symbol when there are not just thousands, but tens of  thousands or hundreds of thousands of such books out there. Sure, not as lavishly decorated, but in terms of content, the same.

So these great collectors diverted their cash to roman statues for their gardens, lions and rhinoceros for their menageries and tapestries and pictures for their state rooms.

Printers had made the mistake of asking their clients what they wanted and then produced that. And as Henry Ford once said, if I asked my clients what they want, they would say “A faster horse”. Printing became a solution in search of a problem.

As demand dwindled printing became concentrated in the major commercial centres, in Strasburg, Nürnberg, Augsburg as well as Venice and Paris. What kept printers alive weren’t the great, beautiful editions that are now gathered in the Morgan Library in New York, but very pedestrian, simple documents, most of which ended up as waste paper. The largest print runs were the same that helped Gutenberg in the beginning, schoolbooks and indulgences. In 1515 pope Leo X asked printers in Germany to produce 200,000 indulgences forms. Some presses survived in places where a local ruler sponsored them, for instance to produce their ordinances and political pronouncements, or to serve a newly founded university, like, say, Wittenberg.

This commercial malaise ended with the appearance of Martin Luther. The printing of his 95 theses and subsequent pamphlets did not only change the world of religion and politics, but also the world of printing. Wherever there was a printing press, his tracts and those of his adversaries were produced in the hundreds of thousands, not on behalf of the church or a prince, but to satisfy customer demand.

But to say that Luther singlehandedly saved printing does not sound convincing. Like all of us will ultimately do, Martin Luther shuffled off this mortal coil in 1546, ending the flood of letters, tracts and books. Still, printing has continued ever since.

Hence printing must have provided something to its consumers that they cherished and were willing to pay for. Was it simply the mass availability of books, or was there more to it?

Whilst pretty much everyone almost from Gutenberg’s day onwards agreed that printing fundamentally changed the world, nobody really dug into the question of what exactly it was that the use of moveable type changed; until the 1970s when the American Historian Elisabeth Eisenstein developed her groundbreaking thesis: “The Printing Press as an Agent of Change”.

Eisenstein began to break down the differences between manuscript culture before Gutenberg and printing culture after 1450. Much of what she identified is still not fully explored in detail, nor is it neatly organised into lists and frameworks. But enough to make a subjective list of what the printing press has ever done for us.

The first thing that the invention of moveable type changed was the accuracy of content. In a world where each and every book was a handwritten copy of a handwritten copy, the question whether the words on the page were in any way related to the original text depended on the diligence of every single scribe in the long line of scribes stretching back to when Aristotle dropped his pen in 322 BC. There is no reason to believe that master printers and compositors in the 16^th century were any more diligent than monks in their scriptoria. A bible printed in 1631 posited “thou shalt commit Adultery” and revealed in Deuteronomy 5 that “the LORD our God hath shewed us his glory and his great-asse”.

But what made printed books more accurate were three things. First, most print shops employed a corrector who would read through the preprint and seek out errors. These men were often learned scholars or the authors themselves. Then there was the scrutiny of readers. If a book was printed in an edition of 1,000 copies, at least a thousand, if not more, people would read it and see logical or grammatical errors or find deviations from other editions of the same work. These errors they would report back to the printer.

Meanwhile, a hand written manuscript would only be read by a handful people, and in the case of the magnificently illuminated copies, probably even fewer. And it was most unlikely that two copies of the same book were in the same library, making it hard to identify different versions. And once an error had been identified, it would only be corrected in the margins of this copy, not the ones further up the chain.

And then there was the question what a printer could do once an error was spotted. He could and would regularly issue errata, alerting readers to mistakes made. And by the next edition, the errors would be eradicated. So over time, definitive versions of the Greek philosophers, the doctors of the church, the Roman poets and historians and so much more were created through these iterations. These more accurate versions of existing texts then became the foundation on which to expand knowledge further.

One example how this worked was the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first true modern Atlas being published from 1570 onwards in Antwerp by Abraham Ortelius. This work comprised 70 maps in its first edition. Ortelius invited readers and cartographers to highlight errors, suggest edits and send in their own maps. Some, not all of the suggestions were then incorporated in the next edition. By the 25^th edition in 1598 the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum had grown to 167 maps and Ortelius cited 183 cartographers who have contributed to the work. Such collaborative effort would not have been possible without the ability to produce editions of several hundreds of thousands copies for interested readers to check and review.

That being said, printers also published a whole lot of nonsense. Gutenberg himself had brought out the prophecies of the sybil, some weird predictions that trace back to a member of the Flagellants, these men and women who staged processions during the Black Death, whipping themselves as a means to fend off evil, whilst probably adding to the spread of the disease.

One of the most popular of these nonsense books were the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, a combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. These books allegedly contained all the world’s wisdom that God had shared with Adam just before the expulsion from Paradise. Adam then passed it to this Greco-Egyptian god who compiled all that could ever be known about philosophy, the natural science and everything else in one great book to be shared amongst the people. In the process of copying through the millennia much content was lost or became garbled. Astrologers and alchemists in particular took the text as a starting point to recover the wisdom of the ancients and find the Philosopher’s stone.

Now before we laugh about the foolishness of our ancestors we should remember that 15^th century society had not caught up with ancient Greece and Rome. Hence researching how the ancients did build their houses and temples, healed their sick or organised their state were ways to progress society. And by 1500 who knew which of these ancient texts contained groundbreaking insights and which ones were nonsense – well, nobody knew. This information needed to be reviewed and experimented with. In the case of these so-called Hermetic writings, it took until 1614 before they were debunked. But, and that is the important point, they were debunked through investigation and experiment, the modern way we split fact from fiction.

The next feature that printing added to books was permanence. Not permanence of the physical book, which was printed on paper, a material much less durable than parchment. But the continuation of the content. Before printing, books simply disappeared because abbots or university deans decided a particular work was not worth to be copied again. After Gutenberg it was the printer, and that meant ultimately the market, the interested public, who determined what was to survive. And given the lower cost of printing, even a comparatively small number of readers could ensure the continued existence of a piece of writing.

Having increasingly more accurate and more permanent and just simply more content was a huge step forward, but all of it would have been useless without the ability to locate and consume that information.

Let me explain this with the book I hold in my hand right now. Its title is “The Gutenberg Parenthesis”.  The title is intriguing and at least points towards what the book is likely to contain, which is why I borrowed it from the library. Before printing, books were usually referred to by the first two or three words of the actual text. A bit like papal bulls. The most recent one, from May 9, 2024 is entitled “Spes Non Confundit” meaning “Hope does not disappoint”. 10 points to Gryffindor if you can tell from the title what that bulle is about.

Then I look look at the title page of my book, where it says “The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Internet” and gives me the name of the author, Jeff Jarvis and the publisher. By now I have a pretty decent idea what this book is about. Most medieval manuscript’s did not have a front pages, text starts immediately with a nicely drawn initial. Sill no clues what it will be about.

Then we come to the contents pages. Each chapter has its own title which conveys even more information, like chapter 2 “How to print”, again quite clear what this will be about. Plus a page number, so I can go straight there and read that particular chapter.

Manuscript – no table of contents. No page numbers.

At the back of my book, there is an index. If I want to check back on what this author says about Ortelius’ Theatrum, the index directs me to page 73.

Now imagine you are a scholastic scholar and you are debating a point of theology with another scholar in a disputation. Your opponent makes the point that Thomas Aquinas said in his Summa Theologica that “Jesus avoided extreme poverty” You doubt that. So where in the Summa Theologica of Aquinas is that statement? These words appear in Part III, Question 40, Article 3. In the internet copy I found of it, it is on page 5051. How could you find this quotation in a huge book with no page numbers, no list of contents and no index, and all that whilst you are in the midst of a debate.

Just imagine how much time medieval scholars must have spent trying to find the right quotation in their hand written books. What made that even harder was the layout of sentences and pages. You remember how hard Gutenberg worked to make sure both columns of his bible were perfectly symmetrical and justified on the right. That looks beautiful, but does not aid legibility. No paragraphs, limited punctuation, gothic script…just very hard.

And then there is the problem of finding the books. As the age of print progressed, libraries began organising their books in systems, alphabetically or by topic, but within opic, again, alphabetically. And they would create catalogues, first as lists, but then the card catalogue allowing readers to search by author or by topic. Bibliographies told scholars what books existed and where to find them, and book sellers produced list of titles they either had available or knew how to procure.

These somewhat mundane additions and processes were of incredible importance. As you most probably know, it wasn’t the fall of Constantinople in 1453 that suddenly released Greek and Roman literature into western Europe. As we discussed in episode 172 the participants of the Council of Constance set out in search of lost books amongst the German monasteries, because the Italian and Greek ones had already been thoroughly searched for ancient writings. In other words, the information was already there. The problem had been accessibility. Now with editions of hundreds or thousands of copies, title pages, page numbers, agreed titles the connections began to form, like neurons starting to fire together in the brain, wiring distant areas of learning and understanding together. And as these networks expanded they became able to perform ever more complex functions, propelling what we call the Renaissance to a higher level, initiating the Reformation and facilitating the rise of modern Science.

The emergence of the printed book changed the way information was consumed. Before printing books were most often read aloud. University professors would read the works to students, hence the term lecture. Monks and priests read the gospel aloud during services. Private, silent reading was unusual, in part because very few people privately owned books. They went into libraries or universities to hear them being read. But now, as the number s of available books had grown thousandfold, individuals owned their own books and could read them in private. And when you read silently, thoughts can penetrate your head more easily, you can stop mid-sentence and check back, more connections are made, and more ideas, more questions occupy the reader.

Eisenstein was fascinated with the early printer workshops. This was a place where artisans of various kinds, type cutters, compositors, printers came together with writers and intellectuals in an environment overseen by the master printer, himself often writer, translator, editor and entrepreneur. Erasmus famously proofread his works at the Basel workshop of Johann Froben. These places were places of secular intellectual exchange not seen in Europe since the Roman baths closed in the fifth century. And this link between printing and intellectual gatherings continued into the London coffeehouses of the 17^th and 18^th century whose proprietors issued newspapers to their patrons keen to discuss the latest inventions, political shenanigans, society gossips as well as maritime insurance.

Which gets to the next point. In the Middle Ages, the ultimate decision which book was replicated and thereby disseminated lay with the abbot who ran the scriptorium. That monopoly had already softened as commercial copyists set up shop in the major cities and universities, producing whatever their customers asked for. But these customers tended to be either members of the church or aspiring to a career in theology or law.

Master Printers were first and foremost entrepreneurs. For their business model to work, they needed to find buyers for their print runs that quickly went from a few hundred to 1,000 and then ever more. The church was a huge customer and as we have seen with Gutenberg, Fust and Schöffer remained so for a long time. But the church was not the sole customer. Printers famously produced Luther’s writings, but also more and more works that had less to do with religious education. One early bestseller was “the Ship of Fools” from 1494. In it Sebastian Brant tells of a whole fleet of silly, coarse and vulgar people setting off from Basel to Narragonien, the paradise of fools. It is a satire about the late medieval/early renaissance society. And it featured as the first of the fools, the book fool, a man who is immensely proud of the large number of books he had acquired, but which he has never read. The fact that by 1494 someone like a book fool could exist says a lot about the proliferation of printing and the taste of its readers.

Wen we talk about printing, it is important to remember that printed books sometimes contain more than just text. They also contained images, initially woodcuts and later engravings. These techniques predate printing, but found a new and important application in books.

The Ship of Fools was decorated with 103 woodcuts, according to some the work of Albrecht Dürer. But there is one book you will almost immediately recognise, not for its text, but for its magnificent woodcuts. The Schedel’sche Weltchronik or Nuremberg Chronicle as it is known in the Anglo-Saxon world. This enormous undertaking was initiated by two Nurnberg merchants in 1491 as a commercial venture. On 656 pages in the Latin version and 596 in the German one, Hartmann Schedel drones on about the history of the world from the day of creation until 1493. The writing is in the main plagiarised from existing authors, including works by the inevitable Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini, and where it is by the man himself, apparently very dull. But nobody cared about that. The 1809 printed images, in particular the 31 double-sided views of major European cities are instantly recognisable. Sure, some woodcuts were used several times, giving Naples and Florence as well as Strasbourg and Mainz an uncanny similarity. But what a masterpiece of the art of the woodcut.

Commercially, it was a disaster. Anton Koberger, by then Europe’s first media tycoon operating 12 presses with agents all across europe had printed around 2,500 copies, of which more than 500 had remained unsold by 1509.

Anton Koberger’s financial hardship were however not the only downsides the rise of printing brought into the world. The drive towards definitive versions that had made books more accurate and more permanent led at the same time to standardisation, crowding out diversity.

Printers in the 16^th century produced costume books, giving an idea what people in different countries were wearing. These images were pored over by artists who included them in their paintings, from where they returned back into woodcuts and engravings, developing into stereotypes with a life of their own. Not every Spanish lady wears a flamenco dress, nor would you see a pair of Lederhosen in Hamburg or Düsseldorf. Actually I take this back, there are enough pseudo Bavarians in Düsseldorf that you may see them occasionally.

Once copies of Vitruvius book on architecture, complete with exquisite engravings appeared everywhere from Stockholm to Seville, its stringent rules about the order of columns, proportions, symmetry etc. spread with it. Not that European architecture becomes uniform overnight, but distinct local styles became regional and by the 19^th century national and international in the 20^th.

Whilst architecture moves slowly, the standardisation of language moved much faster. Bible translations, like Luther’s set the standard for a unified language for the German lands, relegating for example low German to a dialect. This process at different times and triggered by different books took place all across Europe. For me the most confusing of these standardisations is the Germanic part of Switzerland where the language that people speak, Swiss German, is not the language they write in. Swiss Newspapers, novels and even poems are in High German, easy to understand for me, whilst I am completely lost when listening to locals on the Bahnhofstrasse.

But it is not just language. In 1542 the historian Johann Sleidan wrote: quote: “As if to offer proof that god had chosen to accomplish a special mission, there was invented in our land a marvellous new and subtle art, the art of printing. This opened German eyes, even as it is now bringing enlightenment to other countries” end quote.

Gutenberg’s invention came in the midst of all the chaos of the empire and the ever more persistent realisation that the country was falling behind its neighbours, politically and economically. In this time and the centuries that followed, German national pride could not attach to great battles and far-flung lands conquered, but it focused on culture, language and ingenuity. Gutenberg’s printing press was the first of a long list of engineering achievements that formed part of the self-image of Germans then and still today.

This brings us now almost to modern times where we may be facing another shift on the scale of Gutenberg’s printing press, the internet and all its offshoots from search engines to social media and artificial intelligence.

I will not pretend that I could predict the future. I did that for a decade and I could never figure out which of my many predictions would come true. But there is an interesting theory making the rounds in media studies, called the Gutenberg Parenthesis.

The idea is that there were modes of communication and interaction that existed before the printed book, that went into some sort of hibernation between 1600 and 2000, and are now returning via social media.

Specifically the idea is that before Gutenberg information gathering and dissemination was a collaborative, largely oral process. For instance the Hanseatic merchants were receiving information from their correspondents in the other Hanse cities whilst simultaneously disseminating information to their friends at home and recipients elsewhere. This kind of information gathering and dissemination was largely replaced by newspapers from the 17th century onwards. People no longer needed a friend telling them the prices for copper in London were, they could look it up in the back pages of the precursors of the Financial Times.

Print created a world in which certain institutions acquired the credibility and later the monopoly to disseminate information. And this did not just apply to hard facts. In pre Gutenberg times, narratives like the chivalric romances, the tales of King Arthur were altered and added to first by oral storytellers and then by writers. There was no single author of the definitive version of the legends of Parzival. Sebastian Brandt was ranting about editions of his Ship of Fools containing new text he had never written. By the 18th century copyright allowed authors to keep control over their creations, which is why Goethe’s Faust has a final approved version whilst Shakespeare’s Hamlet has competing versions.

The Information age has revived some of these pre-Gutenberg ways of producing and sharing content. When important news break, journalists go to social media looking for videos made by bystanders, rather than wait for their correspondent to make his or her way to the scene. And since we can all access these same videos, we receive information at the same time and in the same way as the professionals.

And not only that. We pass this information on to our contacts, usually with a comment giving our assessment of what we think it meant. And this comment is then passed through the chain again, very much like our Hanseatic merchants shared information and comment with their friends and colleagues.

And as information gathering and dissemination is democratised, organisations like Wikipedia can become the repository of knowledge superior to any Encyclopaedia and Bellingcat can investigate events more thoroughly and more effectively than intelligence agencies.

As for fiction, I guess some of you are familiar with apps like Wattpad, fanfiction.Net or Ao3, where anyone can publish their own stories, some genuine new creations, but many as variants of existing novels or universes. There are at least 810,000 fan fiction extensions of the Harry Potter Universe, a very modern version of the retelling and embellishing of the Knights of the Round Table.

3 of the top 10 books in the US YTD are from authors who started out as self-published writers, without the support of editors and marketing budgets. Some of these authors have risen to success via BookTok where 730 million monthly active users swap tips about books to read.

And this podcast too owes its existence to the replacement of the monopoly of publishers by collaborative tech. Yes, podcasts are probably the most linear of modern media with a host or hosts droning on about whatever they want to talk about. Nevertheless, when I listen to a podcast, I feel part of a community, much like listening to a storyteller on a medieval market square. It is a very different, more ancient experience than watching a documentary on television.

Sure there are huge problems with social media, I guess you all know them so there is no need to list them here, but at the same time we should not forget that there are huge upsides. And in the same way that printing of Luther’s theses drowned europe in a tsunami of death and destruction hitherto unknown to humanity, printing also replaced Hermes Trismegistus with Newton, Einstein and Stephen Hawking. It took a while and pain came before gain, but gain came in the end.

And that is it with armchair philosophy and its cousin, media studies. Next week we will go back to our usual fare of princely pursuits, of harassed heiresses and battled bishops. We will drop further south from the city of Mainz and meet the next elector, the Count Palatinate on the Rhine. I hope you will join us again.

As you may have noticed, all the positive changes in the world of information gathering and dissemination, Wikipedia, Bellingcat and new fiction rely in the main on users voluntarily contributing to what they perceive as valuable, rather than advertising.  Hence if you are inclined to support this next revolution in human communication in its grass roots, go to historyofthegermans.com/support and sign up as a patron.

The Invention of printing

This podcast is now well into its fourth year and I have established my process for research, script writing and recording. As for research, that usually means going to the London Library and bend down to the lowest shelf to dig up some age-old copy of a German language book that happens to be the one and only works that goes into the kind of detail on the topic at hand you guys have gotten used to.

Imagine my confusion when I started looking into Johannes Gutenberg and found not just a few books, but whole shelves of books in English, German, French, Italian and dozens more talking about even the most intricate details of the life and works of the inventor of the printing press.

Drowning in this avalanche of material, I realized that at a minimum this story requires two episodes, one about how Gutenberg came to achieve this breakthrough and then the impact his invention had on the world and on the Germans in particular.  

Hence today’s episode is about the man and his invention, though about the man we know so very little….

Listen on Spotify

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 187 – Gutenberg’s Pressing Matters, which is also episode 3 of Season 10 – the Empire in the 15^th century.

This podcast is now well into its fourth year and I have established my process for research, script writing and recording. As for research, that usually means going to the London Library and bend down to the lowest shelf to dig up some age-old copy of a German language book that happens to be the one and only works that goes into the kind of detail on the topic at hand you guys have gotten used to.

Imagine my confusion when I started looking into Johannes Gutenberg and found not just a few books, but whole shelves of books in English, German, French, Italian and dozens more talking about even the most intricate details of the life and works of the inventor of the printing press.

Drowning in this avalanche of material, I realized that at a minimum this story requires two episodes, one about how Gutenberg came to achieve this breakthrough and then the impact his invention had on the world and on the Germans in particular.  

Hence today’s episode is about the man and his invention, though about the man we know so very little….

But before we start just another reminder that the History of the Germans is advertising free and for good reason. It does not take a genius to notice that the way we communicate as a society has changed. We do spend a lot of time on electronic media of all kinds, not just social media, but podcasts, streaming, youtube etc. Most of this content is paid for by advertising. Advertisers, in the absence of better metrics, pay the platforms and creators on the basis of eyeballs or ear canals. And since our crocodile brains are still dominating the cerebellum, our eyeballs and ear canals  always turn to the loudest and most eye catching. But that is not aways the information our frontal cortex wants and should feed on.  We need stuff that may be less exciting, but more thoughtful. And that is not what advertisers can pay for. So we need at least a part of our information world that is funded by its users. That is why I have subscriptions to newspapers and libraries, am happy to pay for the BBC and for Netflix. And for some podcasts and Substacks too. And if you want to do the same and for some reason feel the History of the Germans is deserving your support, go to historyofthegermans.com/support and sign up as a patron.  And thanks a lot to Marko P., James Zapf, Kenneth H., MarkV, Mark Young, Swin Purple and Jeff N. who have already done that.

And with that, back to the show

Johannes Gutenberg was born sometime between 1393 and 1400 in Mainz. His family was comparatively well off, part of the 100 ancient families of the city, what we call today a patrician. The family lived mainly off annuities, financial instruments issued by the city that generated a solid and predictable income. We also know that his father was a companion of the mint, meaning he was on some sort of supervisory board of the archepiscopal mint  that struck the Rhenisch Gulden, the most common currency in the Holy Roman Empire.

His name, Gutenberg, derived -as was customary – from his family home, the Hof zum Gutenberg in the city centre, next to St. Christopherus church.  Gutenberg translates as “hill of the good people” but that was not its origin. Where it stood had once been the home of one of the largest Jewish communities in europe. That community had been subjected to pogroms ever since 1096, as we discussed in episode 38, but the great expulsion had come in 1349 when the Black Death struck. Allegedly 6,000 men, women and children chose to commit suicide by setting light to their synagogue rather than convert. Where they once lived, the Judenberg, was given to the city council and a patrician family built a house on the site. As memory of the atrocities faded, that house turned from Judenberg to Gutenberg, which in 1419 the family adopted as their family name.

And that is all we know about his first 30 plus years. He may have gone to university, he may have trained as a goldsmith, or he may have just hung out in in bars and nightclubs for all we know.

In 1434 he moved to Strasbourg, a city that at that time was much larger and much richer than Mainz. Mainz had been going downhill due to mismanagement by the city council, internal conflicts, the endless fighting between the archbishops and their neighbours and the regular schisms between two contenders for the archepiscopal throne. It had not recovered its population from before the Black Death. Strasbourg on the other hand was thriving, reaching 25,000 inhabitants, a major hub in the wine trade that stretched all the way to Norway and Scotland. Its cathedral, one of the greatest achievements of gothic art was still rising up and the streets were lined with impressive stone houses of prosperous merchants and artisans.

What Gutenberg did in Strasbourg for the following 10 years is shrouded in mystery. Some argue he did already begin printing there in 1440, but no proof of such activity can be found. All we do know about this time is from court records, according to which he was engaged in the production of mirrors and some “adventure and art” that was kept secret.

He left Strasbourg in 1444, then disappears from the records before he returned to Mainz in 1448. Seemingly flush with cash he buys out his siblings and moves in the old family home. And that is where he starts his printing business for real. In 1454 he published his masterpiece, the Gutenberg bible.

That is it. He never wrote down what inspired him, how he developed the technology or what he wanted to achieve with it. All these books that have been written about Gutenberg’s life, and there are at least three available in English, are all conjecture. Well-argued and meticulously researched, but in the end more suitable for a true crime than for a history podcast.

But what we have is his magnificent innovation, according to Luther, “Gods ultimate and greatest gift”.

Johannes Gutenberg stands in a line with the world’s great inventors, the James Watts, the Thomas Alva Edisons, the Carl Benz and Louis Pasteurs. But as much as we would all love to read the story of the lone genius  who had that one brilliant idea that propelled the world forward, we have to acknowledge that boring academic research has proven again and again, that there are very few if any instances where innovation happened that way. All these great advances were usually the culmination of multiple strands of developments that came together at a particular time and a particular place to be picked up by some determined individual who happened to be at the right place at the right time.

Let’s see whether printing with moveable letter was the same..

First up, Gutenberg did not invent printing. People have been printing things for hundreds if not thousands of years using wooden stamps. And since the late 14^th century the art of the woodcut was spreading cross europe, a technique that allowed to print images or a page of text multiple times.

Gutenberg’s technology deviated from this technique first by using metal rather than wood. Metal is much more durable, allowing the production of a much larger number of copies before the stamps wear out.

The second downside of the woodcut was that to create a whole book would require to carve every single page first in wood, as a mirror image and then making an imprint. That was not only time consuming, but also left no room for error. If say only one letter was wrong, the whole woodcut had to be made from scratch again. Which is why nobody did that.

Gutenberg’s press used moveable type. So there would be a stamp for each letter and they would be assembled to form the respective words and sentences. If there was an error, all you need to do, was replace the letter and restart the printing.

That’s it. Genius! That is the invention. Let’s just go and start printing.

But hold on. Let’s think about that. If you want to print a book, you will need a lot of these individual letter stamps, called punches. And I mean a lot. For example in my scripts I use about 3,500 characters per page. The Gutenberg bible was a bit more generous with space and used only 2,400. But then he printed at least two pages on the same sheet of paper. That is 4,800  punches minimum per print run.

So, let’s take a look at how these punches could be made. Punches were originally created in coin making. Up until the modern days coins were made by creating a metal disk usually containing some gold, silver or copper. This disk is then struck with a punch to imprint the desired image, say heads or tails on to the disk. The punch consists of a handle like that of a chisel, a steel shank of a few centimetres’ length into which the punch maker had engraved an image. The coin maker would then carefully place this punch over the metal disk and strike it with a hammer. In a sophisticated mint, such as the mint in Mainz, there would be another die underneath the disk, called an anvil, so that both sides of the coin would be struck at the same time.

Now here is the rub. The anvil lasted about 36,000 strikes and the punch only about 20,000 strikes, A very large mint like Venice would produce about 20,000 coins a day, meaning the punch needed to be replaced every day. Mainz was certainly smaller, but still, the punches only functioned for a limited period of time.

So every day or every couple of days a punch maker needed to engrave a new punch. And this punch had to look exactly the same as the previous punch to make sure the coins looked identical. Then the coins were quite small the images however quite intricate. These minute images had to be engraved into a steel punch that had to be heated and cooled several times to harden it, but without becoming brittle. Then the engraving had to be done into the steel, with steel. There was no way you could get hold of a diamond cutter. So steel was used on steel to scrape off some minuscule curls of steel. I have no way of checking this, but according to John Man’s book The Gutenberg Revolution, a good punch maker could create letter on a scale of 0.01 millimetres, which is 6 times the resolution of a modern laser printer.

And a punch maker needs about a day to make one punch. So to make our 4,800 punches needed to print two pages would take, well 4,800 days, which given feast days and holidays meant it would take one punch maker 20 years to make all the punches  needed for these 2 pages, or 20 punch makers a year. And Gutenberg did neither have 20 years nor the funds to employ 20 punch makers. Plus each letter would end up being just that tiny bit different.

So he needed a more efficient solution to make metal punches. And that solution was the hand mould. Now I have been warned to try to describe the hand mould. Someone called Joseph Moxton tried 200 years ago and when his 13 page description was reprinted, the editors wrote in the comments that “nobody should try to understand the hand mould by reference to this description”.

Printing Like Gutenberg and Hand Casting Type

But the idea is the following. You create one punch for each letter. Then you use the punch to create an imprint, called the matrix. The matrix is then inserted and fixed at the bottom of the hand mould. And then you pour metal into the mould which then creates a little rectangular stick with the letter at the top. Repeat again and again and hey presto one punch is turned into lots and lots of cloned punches. But there is still a problem, if you were to make these from say steel, it would take a few hours to cool naturally or you could cool it down rapidly using water or oil, which would add another step in the process.

Which gets us to the next bit of alchemy, the metal he used for these cloned punches. It was an amalgam of lead, tin and antimony. This alloy is not only liquid but has a habit of cooling extremely quickly. So, you can pour in the molten metal that was heated to 327 degrees Celsius and take out the new punch almost immediately, already cool enough to be handled. And bang, you take out the letter punch and you can use the hand mould again to make the next, and the next and the next.

Ok, great. Now you can make lots and lots of the 24 or 26 letters of the alphabet. But there is another problem. Gutenberg wanted to create a print that looked like a handwritten manuscript, just better. And that meant he needed a lot more than 26 types. There were various special signs that were used as abbreviations in the handwritten manuscripts around at the time. He needed these. And he wanted the flow from one letter to the next – again – like in a handwritten manuscript, which meant having to create multiple versions of each letter with different attachment points. In the end, his typefaces had between 220 and 290 different characters. All of which had to be cut into a punch and then moulded dozens, if not hundreds of times.

Great, now you have a pile of letters, but how do you turn this into a page of text? You need to fix them into something. Gutenberg’s solution was to create a frame into which the type setter would place the individual letters. To stop them from wiggling about they were placed into a frame. Sounds straightforward, but let’s think again. First up, not all sentences are the same length, whilst the frame is rectangular. Well, you can fill in the gaps with punch that have no letter, effectively creating a void. Or, you could create various versions of the same letters with just marginally larger or smaller width to end up with a perfectly justified edge to the text. And finally you could play around with little fillers to widen the gap between different letters. And all that has to be done in a way that does not make the text jerky, but flowing naturally, easy to read.

Then you have to make sure that all the letters are absolutely, 100% the same height. If not, you end up with one letter being bold and the next one faint. And we are talking of precision levels in the sub millimetre level.

So now you got your frame with all the letters firmly held in place, something called a “Forme”.  The next question is what material you want to print on. The traditional material to write on in the Middle ages was vellum, made from calf skin. One calf skin produced about 3 pages of the highest quality or 6 pages if stretched out. Hugely expensive. It was a fairly easy to print on material, but if printing was to become as wide spread as it did, it needed another, a cheaper material.

Willkommen | Gutenberg-Museum

Paper had been around in Western Europe since the 11^th century as it spread from China via the Islamic world. But in europe large scale production only began in the 14^th century. One reason was that Chinese paper was fairly soft and absorbent, perfectly suited for Chinese calligraphy, but not ideal for illuminated manuscripts. The Europeans added animal glue to the mix, which hardened it, so it could take ink and paint. The first German papermill opened in 1390 in Nurnberg, but the most desirable paper came from Italy.

The next question was what ink to use. Handwritten manuscripts were written using Iron-gall ink, a black or brown mixture made from iron sulphate, tannic acid and gum arabicum. This ink was too watery, it ran off the types and smeared all over the pages. It was also acidic, so often faded through the paper to the opposite side.

Gutenberg therefore had to develop a new kind of ink, that, since he wanted his books to look like manuscripts, had to have a similar colour to Iron-Gall ink but was more viscous and sticky. Printer’s ink was based on oil paint a material only recently made popular by the early Netherlandish painters, the Jan van Eycks, Rogier van the Weyden and Robert Campin. During the 1440 and 1450s this technique was gradually coming up the Rhine river, finding an important centre in Alsace. In all likelihood it was there, in the workshops of one of these pioneers of oil painting in the Rhineland that Gutenberg first encountered oil-based paint, without which printing with moveable type was simply impossible.

Then we get to the last major technological component, the actual printing press. Woodcuts and other prints had been made by rubbing the paper onto the carved piece. That did work to a  degree, but often left smudges of paint on the page. And Gutenberg needed to print both sides of the page, which meant he needed to fix the paper in exactly the same place twice. Which means we needed a way to fix both the frame with the letter and the paper into place and then apply the exactly accurate level of force on to it.

The solution for that was – the wine press. Mainz is in the midst of a wine growing region. The Gutenberg family owned a farm near Eltville, right in the centre of the Rheingau, source of some of Germany’s finest white wines. Wine presses work with screws and are calibrated to exert exactly the right amount of pressure to squeeze the liquid out of the grapes, but not smash them into pulp. Ideal for printing, where again precision was key.

That is the hardware, the letter types moulded in the hand mould, the frame they are fixed in, called the forme, the ink and the printing press. But that still does not make a book. We also need a process.

The first step is to carve the type, a job usually done by a gold or silversmith, ideally one with experience working in making coin punches. Then we have someone making the types by punching the matrix, fixing it inside the hand mould, first creating the special alloy and then pouring it into the mould.

Once we have the typefaces, they go to the setter who puts together the actual text by placing the respective letters inside the frame. He or she would usually have arranged the punches in two cases, one for the larger and one for the smaller letters, where we got our terms upper case and lower case from. This is a truly sophisticated job. For one, all the letters the setter sees are mirror image. And then he or she has to work out all the gaps and widths to fit the text on to the frame.

The frame is then taken to make a first simple imprint which is given to the corrector. That person will read through the first imprint and check for errors. This is again hugely important because the advantage of printing over handwritten manuscripts was not only cost, but even more, accuracy. Copyists made mistakes and these mistakes then compounded through the line of distribution, from one writer to the next. A printed copy was exactly the same as the next one, making sure only the accurate information is transmitted. But for that the information had to be accurate to start with.

Once approved, the forme then goes to the actual printer. Each printing press is operated by two people. One handles the formes and applies the ink. Application was done with two large leather balls which are covered with a film of oil paint and then banged vertically on to the forme. You do not want to rub it side to side because it would seep in between the letters and smear across the page. Doing that meant the banger often got the sticky oil paint on his fingers that was difficult to wash off. Hence you needed another person to handle the clean sheets of paper. The paper needed to be a bit moist to better absorb the paint, which was one part of the job. Then he had to fix it in place on the paper holder, then lower it over the forme. And finally he slid the forme and paper under the press, turned the screw, released it and slid everything back out. I put a link in the show notes for a video where you can see how that worked.

How a Gutenberg Printing Press Works

Then the paper and paint needed to dry, which meant it was brought up to the loft where it was hung up like washing.

Then the whole process was repeated, to print the back of the page. To make sure that the back and front aligned perfectly, the paper frame had two little pins that pricked the paper. When it came back down having dried in the loft, you put the paper through the same pricks when fixing it, and hey presto, perfection.

I hope you get what I am telling you here. The invention of printing was not some eureka moment where Gutenberg jumped up in his bathtub and went – that is how it works.

This was likely a decades long process of trial and error, developing each one of these specific instruments, the hand mould, the forme, the ink, the paper, the printing press and then going through hundreds or thousands of iterations to figure out which combination of materials and pressure worked best. Since Gutenberg left no records of his life apart from legal documents, we do not know how many iterations he went through. But to give you an idea, James Dyson went through 5,127 prototypes of his bagless vacuum cleaner before he finally released DC01, the product that would make him a billionaire. Elon Musk, not my favourite person, took 6 years before his rockets first reached orbit, after several exploded, and that was based on a technology that had already existed since the 1940s. The first reusable rocket, his true innovation, took another 7 years to develop. In other words, innovation is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, that was the case in the 15^th century and it still is the case today.

And it is also most unlikely Gutenberg did develop each of these tools and processes all by himself. Even if he had some goldsmith skills, for which there is no evidence, it is unlikely he could operate at the level of precision required to make the punches. We know he hired a goldsmith, Hans Dunne in Strasburg and kept him on when he moved to Mainz. As for all the other tools, let’s remember that from his days in Strasburg onwards, he had a team of 6 to 8 people working with him, many great artisans in their own right and staying with him throughout.

And then we have the time and place. Mainz and Strasburg in the first half of the 15^th century. Both cities lay on the Rhine river, at the time the trading super highway connecting north and south. There was a mint in Mainz and with it the specialists skills to make high precision punches. And Gutenberg knew about those given his father had been one of the board members of the Mint. It was right around that time that oil painting spread southwards along the rhine from Flanders to Alsace and then Italy.  Paper had gained popularity and was making the same journey in the opposite direction. And Mainz lay in a wine making region with wine presses galore.

It is unlikely that Mainz in 1450 was the only place in the world where printing with moveable type could be invented, in large part because it was invented a few decades earlier in Korea and other forms of printing had been used in China for centuries.

But what moveable type printing did in the 1450s in Mainz was to catch on, which is something it did not do in Korea. And that had to do with two crucial elements every innovation needs, funding and willing customers.

If you look back at the history of Silicon Valley, it is quite obvious that this outburst of innovation and creativity did not come out of nothing. It was a combination of pentagon, mainly navy funded research in Northern California, Stanford university, and then starting in 1972, venture capital firms providing the funding for all that makes up our modern world, including the pinnacle of technological and creative achievement, podcasts.

Gutenberg too was dependent upon financial backers.

He found a first group of them when he moved to Strasbourg in 1434. He himself had about 350 gulden, enough to buy a substantial house, but not enough to create a business on the scale we are talking about here. So he invited three partners to join him.

And at that point he did not invite them to join them in a decades long chase to develop the printing press. The idea he brought them was to make mirrors. 

Not posh glass mirrors, but small handheld mirrors. How do you get rich with mirrors? Well, that is something that could only have worked in the madness of the 15^th century. The black death and the recurring outbreaks of the Plague, the huge uncertainty caused by endless feuds, the absence of a central authority, the split of the church during the schism, the Hussite revolt, the threat of a Turkish invasion, all that left people utterly unsettled. They sought refuge in their faith, and in particular in the support they hoped saintly interventions could bring. This is a century of enormous pilgrimages, and one of the most significant ones was the pilgrimage to Aachen. Aachen cathedral does not only hold the bones of Charlemagne, a saint at least in the eyes of many, but some of the most revered of relics, relics that had touched Jesus himself and members of his family. These include the robe of the Virgin Mary, the swaddling clothes of the infant Jesus, the cloth in which the head of John the Baptist was wrapped, and the loincloth worn by Christ on the cross. Touching these sacred relics would transfer so much holiness, any illness, sadness or affliction would instantly dissolve.

Every 7 years these saintly objects would be taken outside the cathedral and shown to the people. Each of these 10 days would see 10,000 pilgrims descending on Aachen trying to catch a glimpse of Jesus’ loincloth. No way the canons would allow anyone to touch the precious objects, but they were so imbued with sanctity, they radiated goodness. So simply being in the presence and catching some of these rays would bring salvation from troubles.

But even though Aachen may see a 100,000 visitors over the 10 days of the festival, this was not enough to satisfy the demand. All those who stayed home, be it due to lack of funds or illness, were in dire need of deliverance. And there was a way to collect these rays of holiness and bring them back home to your loved ones. All you needed was a hand mirror that would capture the  rays emanating from the sacred relics and contain them.

And these were the kinds of mirrors that Johannes Gutenberg intended to produce. And now take a breath, guess how many mirrors he intended to make? 500? A 1000? 10,000? No, 32,000 was the intended production run. Selling those at half a guilder each that would bring in revenues of 16,000 guilders. Production cost were – hold on – 600 guilders. A gross profit margin of 96% or a profit of 26x. That is more than say Facebook or Google Search, albeit not by much. Just to put all this into perspective. Gutenberg’s income was about 30 guilders and his net worth was about 300 guilders.

We do not know how Gutenberg intended to make these magic mirrors, in particular we do not know how he would produce them in such quantities. What he did find though was investors who were willing to support this venture with what turned out to be a lot more than 600 guilders.

At which point we hit on one of the greatest Gutenberg mysteries. What was it he did during his years in Strasburg. Sure, there were the mirrors, but his partners and he himself poured a lot more than the initially intended 600 guilders into this venture. And then there is the court case. Because, surprise, surprise, the scheme did not work out as planned. There was a court case at the end of it where the son of one of the partners demanded his father’s money back.

And what is weird about this court case is that no one, not the claimant, not the witnesses and certainly not the defendant Gutenberg was prepared to explain what exactly the venture was. They talk about an “aventur und kunst”, best translated as a venture and an art. And then they go on about presses and formes and secret arts. Something else beyond the making of mirrors had been going on.

 Given all we heard about the complexity of printing and all the different technologies and processes that had to be developed, it is fair to assume that much of the money intended to make mirrors went into the R&D of printing. And then there is the fact that when he arrives in Mainz in 1348, he immediately sets out to print things using his printing press.

Having left Strasburg and his old business partners behind what he now needed was financing to scale up his business. And he found this financing from a man called Johann Fust. Fust was an important citizen of Mainz and a very wealthy man. He lent Gutenberg 800 gulden in 1449 to set up a printing workshop and would provide funding over the next five years to the tune of 4,500 gulden, the same as 12 substantial houses in the city.

Everything is now in place. Gutenberg has a technology and a process. He had brought along some members of his old team from Strasbourg and hired more. And he had financing.

All he now needed was customers. Who would want to own a printed book, or any printed material?

What he had going for him was a veritable explosion in literacy during the previous hundred years. Knowledge was no longer confined to within the walls of monasteries. By 1440 the German lands boasted 9 universities, up from none in 1370. Running a trading business had become more and more reliant on writing, on the exchange of letters and the drafting of contracts, hence the sons and sometimes the daughters of the city merchants went to newly opened schools. And even artisans and labourers keen to expand their horizons learned to read.

And what did they read, manuscripts. Along with the growth in literacy a whole industry of scribes had developed. Paper had been the killer application. Costing a10th of vellum and parchment, the material itself had become accessible. Entrepreneurs set up writing businesses where scribes would copy books, pamphlets, missals and breviers by the dozen.

In other words, books were more and more accessible.

But these handwritten books and documents had a serious weakness. They were written in haste and hence prone to errors. And for some books, errors were unacceptable.

A copy of a major theological treatise must not carry mistakes – imagine what happened if you misinterpret St. Augustine. Same goes even more for missals, the books that lay down in detail how each mass throughout the year is supposed to be celebrated. Any error there and the whole of the congregation may find itself falsely instructed.

But even more practical things needed to be accurate, like schoolbooks. The most widely used schoolbook of the 15^th century was the so-called Donatus, a 4^th century Latin grammar, a concise book aimed at young students. Again, it is self-evident that a student buying this book would be very badly served did he pick up a version with lots of errors.

 So, this is how the history of printing begins, with a school book. The Donatus by Gutenberg probably came out in 1450 and remained a mainstay of his workshop throughout.

Another line of business came out of the political situation. The Ottomans kept progressing up the Balkans whilst at the same time threatening Cyprus and Constantinople. Pope Nikolaus V called for a crusade and to fund the endeavour offered full indulgences against pay.

Indulgences were not only spiritual offers, but they were also physical objects. About one page of dense text recording the exact wording of the papal bull granting the indulgence, its conditions and application. It also featured, of course, the name of the sinner, the name of the priest granting the indulgence and his signature on the receipt.

These pieces of paper could be presented at the next confession and led to automatic absolution of sins and reduction of time in purgatory. Again, this was not a document where  spelling mistakes or – worse – the omission of whole lines of text was acceptable.

Coming to the rescue, Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press. Hence the second key output of the printing press were forms for indulgences, faithfully recording the papal bull, leaving space to add the names of sinner and priest and the signature.

Other products were more for daily use. One was the so-called Turk calendar, a calendar for the year with woodcuts and statements encouraging the reader to take up arms against the Turks, or even better, give money to those who wanted to fight. I will not go into another product, the so called sibylline prophecies that he may or may not have printed and what they meant. That is the kind of rabbit whole that has swallowed many a Gutenberg scholar.

An Admonition to Christendom against the Turks. | Library of Congress

So far , so seriously underwhelming. School books, calendars, indulgences – clearly not the kind of output that propels one to the European Pantheon of greats.

What Gutenberg needed was a best seller, a book that would display the absolute superiority of his innovative production process and that would hopefully make him rich.

Talking about rich, the print runs were going well, but cash flow was still a bit tight. The problem was the same that had felled so many innovative companies – payment terms.

By the time the first little scholar handed over his 2 shillings for the Donatus, Gutenberg had already paid all his suppliers of paper, metal and ink, his employees, his rent and the interest on his loans. And as demand for his print runs went up, so did his upfront expenditure, meaning he had a thriving business but every money that came in went straight out the door to pay from materials for the next print run. And that meant he did not have the money to make that one killer app, the kind of book that would divide world history into before and after.

So he went back to Johann Fust and asked for another loan, a loan needed to set up another, a second print workshop where he would produce that killer app.

And what was this killer app. Initially he had wanted to piggy back on an initiative to issue a new, revised missal for the whole of the enormous archdiocese of Mainz and all its suffragan bishoprics. If that had gone through, it would have been a gold mine. Gutenberg’s printing press was the only device that could guarantee that every single copy of the missal was identical. And every one of the thousands of parishes in the diocese would have needed to buy one.

But it did not come off. Both the archbishop and the Roman curia had sponsored the development of missals and neither could force the other to sanction their product. So no missal was agreed and betting on one winning out in the end would have been utter madness.

Exhausted with waiting for the missal, in 1452, Gutenberg decided to go for the big one, the whole bible. 

To get an idea of the scale of the undertaking, the Gutenberg bible comprised 1,275 pages of text mostly in 42 lines. It was produced in an edition of 180 copies, some of them on vellum, but most on paper. Not any odd paper, but special, expensive Italian paper.

It was not just an accurate copy of the at the time most accurate copy of the vulgate, the Latin bible, it was also and still remains, one of the most beautiful books ever printed. Each letter is printed as sharp and as accurate as humanly possible. The entire text, in two columns is justified on the end, requiring an incredibly fiddly adjustment of individual letters until they all match.

In 1455 probably Fust, not Gutenberg, brought the bible to the Frankfurt fair, then and now the greatest trade fair in the German lands. And already at the time it had a section dedicated to books. And who would come to poke around the latest issues, than our friend, legendary composer of bestselling erotica and future pope Pius II, Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini.

And he got very excited, so excited he wrote back to his then boss, the Spanish cardinal de Caravjal: quote: “I did not see complete bibles, but quinternions [those five sheet, twenty page sections] of different books, written in extremely elegant and correct letter, without error, which your eminence could read with no difficulty and without glasses” end quote.

Piccolomini tried to buy a copy but was told that all copies had been pre-ordered.

Gutenberg had his best seller. He had produced a book that was not cheaper than a manuscript, but infinitely better, its letters sharper, its layout more beautiful and most importantly – error free.

Gutenberg stood on the verge of becoming immensely rich and celebrated as the man who invented the world’s most important new technology for a 1000 years. But as he stood there, Johann Fust pulled the rug from under his feet.

Gutenberg had never paid any of the interest he owed on all the various loans he had taken out. And right now, in 1455, with the bibles almost completed, but not sold for cash, he had no money, just debt. Sure, he knew that as soon as he dispatched the books, the funds, maybe as much as 9,000 gulden would be flooding in, but right now, he did not have a penny. And Johann Fust knew that too.  He sued Gutenberg, Gutenberg was forced to hand over both his workshops with all the presses, the nearly finished bibles, the materials and everything else he had worked on for nearly two decades.

Johann Fust and his son-in-law, Gutenberg’s former assistant, Peter Schoeffer sold the bibles, made a Fortune, continued the workshop, and rapidly became the largest printing business in the Rhineland and publishing books almost as magnificent as the Gutenberg bible. Gutenberg himself kept going on a smaller scale, but would never have the resources to ever produce anything on the scale of the Gutenberg bible.

And that is where we will stop for today. Next week I will try to assess the impact of Gutenberg’s invention, a task that has defeated many a better man, but – like Gutenberg – I have embarked on this path and cannot stop.

And as usual my closing plea to support the show at historyofthegermans.com/support. All your help is very much appreciated.

Mainz and Hessen

This week we are setting off on our tour of the empire for real. And where better to start than with the most senior, most august of the seven prince Electors, the archbishop of Mainz, archchancellor of the empire, and holder of the decisive vote in imperial elections.

We have already encountered a number of archbishops of Mainz in this podcast, from the treacherous Frederick who tried to overthrow Otto the Great, to Willigis, the eminence grise of the empire under Otto II, III and Henry II, Adalbert, first advisor and then adversary of Henry V, Peter von Aspelt, the man who put the Luxemburgs on the Bohemian throne and lots more.

But this series is not about grand imperial politics, but about the grimy territorial skullduggery inside the empire. And for Mainz this is a story that is deeply entangled with the history of Hessen.

Where Mainz is ancient, tracing its’ eminence back to a saint who had come across the water, Hessen was a new kid on the block amongst the imperial princes. But a very successful one. And at its beginning stood the 24-year-old daughter of a saint holding up her baby son to be acclaimed lord by the people, or some such thing.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans; Episode 186 – Origin Stories, which is also episode 1 of our new series, the empire in the 15^th century.

This week we are setting off on our tour of the empire for real. And where better to start than with the most senior, most august of the seven prince Electors, the archbishop of Mainz, archchancellor of the empire, and holder of the decisive vote in imperial elections.

We have already encountered a number of archbishops of Mainz in this podcast, from the treacherous Frederick who tried to overthrow Otto the Great, to Willigis, the eminence grise of the empire under Otto II, III and Henry II, Adalbert, first advisor and then adversary of Henry V, Peter von Aspelt, the man who put the Luxemburgs on the Bohemian throne and lots more.

But this series is not about grand imperial politics, but about the grimy territorial skullduggery inside the empire. And for Mainz this is a story that is deeply entangled with the history of Hessen.

Where Mainz is ancient, tracing its’ eminence back to a saint who had come across the water, Hessen was a new kid on the block amongst the imperial princes. But a very successful one. And at its beginning stood the 24-year-old daughter of a saint holding up her baby son to be acclaimed lord by the people, or some such thing.

But before we start just a quick reminder that the History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons who have signed up on historyofthegermans.com/support. This week our special thanks go to Tom B., Christopher P., Jocelyn, Cristy Z, Jakub P., Sean Ryder and Jeff B.

Last thing, I have given an interview on the History Flakes Podcast that came out yesterday. History Flakes is a great show presented by Pip and Jonny, two comedians, historians and tour guides from Berlin. I have been listening to their show for a while and really enjoy it. So, tune in, either to hear me hurtling through the history of Brandenburg from the fall of the roman empire to Frederick of Hohenzollern in just about 60 minutes or to one of their other episodes, on the Karl Marx Allee, on Christmas in Berlin or Josephine Baker. The show is called History Flakes, a Berlin History Podcast.

Welcome to History Flakes – The Berlin History Podcast — Whitlam’s Berlin Tours

And with that, back to the show.

Let’s start at the beginning. The city of Mainz was founded by the Roman general Drusus, stepson of Augustus, father of emperor Claudius as well as the grandfather of the emperor Caligula. A most ancient and most august provenance at least by German standards. In the 1^st century CE, Mainz became the military and administrative center of the Province of Upper Germany.

Mainz, like the other important roman cities of Cologne and Trier probably had bishops since the second century, though records and names were lost due to the persecutions and the simple passage of time. Once Christianity became first recognized by the emperor Constantine in 313 and was then made the state religion by Theodosius in 380 AD the bishops of Mainz became more tangible.

These bishops of the 4^th to the 8^th century were occupied with acquiring martyr’s bones, building churches and dabbling in the violent politics of the Merovingian and Carolingian courts. We know very little about their background but is likely that as in other parts of the former Roman Empire the bishops were recruited from the ancient imperial elite, who spoke and wrote in Latin as opposed to the political elite who were descendants of Germanic tribesmen. Gregory of Tours, patron saint of this podcasts, kept going on about the senatorial rank of his family and sneered at the uncouth habits of his political overlords. But sneering from the sidelines gets you only so far.

The turning point for the bishopric of Mainz came with the arrival of a man called Wynfreth. Wynfreth was born around the year 675 somewhere in Anglo-Saxon England. He had received his education in benedictine monasteries, potentially in Exeter and Winchester. This is the time when England and even more so, Ireland were the great repositories of knowledge in western Europe.

In 716 he joined a number of Anglo-Saxon and Irish missionaries going into the wilds of Frisia. And that is the time he took on the name he became best known by, Boniface, or Saint Boniface to you and me.

That Friesian project collapsed when Karl Martell wielded his hammer to close to the intended converts, but Boniface had found his calling. Other than his colleagues, Boniface realized that to be successful on a truly continental scale, he needed the endorsement of both spiritual and temporal authorities. His genius was in forging an alliance between the papacy and the mayors of the palace, the de facto rulers of the Merovingian empire. These mayors of the palace were looking for a way to remove the Merovingian kings, who had turned into purely ceremonial figures, whilst the popes needed both military protection against the Lombards in Italy and a way to get a better handle on the church organization in the Frankish empire.

Boniface became the go-between for the two sides and in the process acquired more and more influence. Part of this political capital was invested in reforming the church, making it less dependent on the Frankish aristocracy and more oriented towards Rome. But his other great task he set himself was to convert “the Germans”.  Though we know that such a term did not really exist in the 8^th century, apart from the name of the now defunct Roman provinces, what was meant was all of the territory east of the Rhine River. For this task Boniface was given the title of Archbishop which came with the right to create dioceses and appoint bishops.

And creating dioceses and appointing bishops was what he did. Some, like Büraburg, Erfurt, Eichstätt und Würzburg, he created from scratch, others, like Regensburg, Passau, Salzburg and Freising he reorganised. He also founded monasteries, the most significant of them was Fulda, where he was also buried.

But he did not get everything the way he wanted. His original plan was to have one unified German missionary church structure, led by an archbishop based in Cologne. But that ran into opposition from the political forces so that he had to settle for Mainz as the seat of his archbishopric. Boniface never really warmed to the place, which is why he spent more time in Fulda, deeper in the pagan heartlands. He died in 754, murdered whilst again attempting to convert the Frisians.

Though Mainz harped on about St. Boniface for centuries after this, the true founder of the Archbishopric of Mainz was his successor, Lullus the Great. Silly name, impressive politician. He wrangled the notion that Mainz was the primate of Germany, though there never was a shred of paper that awarded this title. And he did expand the number of suffragan bishoprics, that is bishops who were under the supervision of the archbishop of Mainz. It did not all happen in one go, but over time the archbishopric of Mainz acquired 14 dependent bishoprics from Chur in modern day Switzerland to Hildesheim in Niedersachsen and from Mainz in the West to Prague in the east. It included such important seats as Speyer, Worms, Constance, Strasbourg, Augsburg and Paderborn. During the Middle Ages, the ecclesiastical province of Mainz was the largest administrative entity in the catholic church after the papal states.

But this role as church administrator was only one of the three pillars of the power of the archbishops.

The second pillar was his political position in imperial politics. St. Boniface was widely and erroneously believed to have crowned Pepin the Short, the first Carolingian king, so that the archbishops of Mainz demanded the right to crown the king of East Francia. And that right was broadly recognised until Archbishop Aribo refused to crown the empress Gisela in 1024 on the grounds of her being too closely related to her husband the emperor Konrad II. The archbishop of Cologne was less tied up with canonical red tape, crowned Gisela, and from that point forward the archbishop of Cologne became the sole legitimate coronator of kings.

What Mainz retained however, was the role as imperial arch chancellor. Though the chancellery travelled with the emperor and the emperor would appoint whoever he wanted as chancellor, the ceremonial responsibility for the Chancellery resided with the archbishop of Mainz. That unfortunately did not include the obligation to maintain complete and accurate archives, which would have done a whole lot of good to the organisational effectiveness of the empire and the accuracy of the historical record. But what it meant was that Mainz was crucial in all imperial elections and imperial diets. When the elections had been unanimous as they were until the 13^th century, Mainz was the first to vote, which made this vote the deciding one. How impactful that can be, check out episode 43, All Change, All Change where the archbishop dramatically tilts the wheel of history. When elections became contestable Mainz voted last of the seven electors, giving it again the deciding vote. Mainz did not only take the lead in deciding who should be next in line for the throne, but also when it came to removing kings deemed unsuitable, like Adolf of Nassau, episode 142 and Wenceslaus the Lazy episode 165. The attempt to depose Sigismund after his blunders in Bohemia we discussed in episode 179 were also led by the archbishop of Mainz.

And then we have a third pillar of the power of the archbishop of Mainz the bit we focus on today. If you remember way back when we discussed the Ottonian and Salian emperors, we talked about the Reichskirchensystem, the organisational structure unique to the empire. The early medieval emperors had granted the bishops and sometimes the abbots temporal lordships. The idea was that the bishop, who was appointed by the emperor would administer these lordships on the emperor’s behalf and would send money, food or soldiers as required to support the ruler. This system, though never working in exactly this neat way, was pursued for roughly a hundred years, from Otto the Great to Henry IV, and even after the emperors were no longer free to appoint bishops at will, emperors would still prefer to grant a vacant county or lordship to a bishop rather than to a great aristocratic rival.

As a consequence, bishops in the empire became prince bishops who not only administered their diocese or ecclesiastical province but also lands and rights they had received as vassals of the emperor. These lands could be and often were rich and extensive. Just take a look at the baroque palaces of Würzburg, Brühl, Bruchsal, Münster and Aschaffenburg and compare these to say the Palais du Tau, home of the archbishop of Reims, the primate of the French church.

Normally the bishoprics had received lands and rights fairly close to their seats. The emperor had no reason to give a county in say Thuringia to a bishop in Bavaria. There was always a bishop nearby who would be much better at administrating this entity than one hundreds of miles away.

But Mainz was different. And that goes back to good old Boniface. As I mentioned, Boniface had founded a number of bishoprics when he set out on his mission. Two of these, Erfurt and Büraburg were not given a new bishop after 755 and instead fully integrated into Mainz. And with them came all their territory.

The next important gain came with the Veronese Donation in 983. This came about after emperor Otto II was defeated at the battle of Capo Colonna in 982. Episode 10 if you want to check back. Otto II needed support from his bishops and so he granted Willigis, the most powerful archbishop at the time, a huge amount of territory south of Frankfurt as well as the Rheingau up to Bingen.

Another territory they acquired much later, in 1230 was the former imperial monastery of Lorsch, between Heidelberg and Darmstadt.

At which point we come to the limitations of audio podcasts. What we now need is a map. I will link one in the show notes, so if you are in a position to do so, click the link and take a look. But the basic problem was that the easternmost possession, the city of Erfurt, is about 300km from Mainz. And hence to create a contiguous territory, the archbishops of Mainz needed to build a land bridge from the western shore of the Rhine all the way to Erfurt in Thuringia.

That was an enormously ambitious undertaking, but not entirely impossible. The territorial entities that dominated the land between Mainz and Erfurt were the counts of Nassau, the Landgraves of Thuringia and the abbey of Fulda as well as dozens and dozens of counts, knights, free cities and the like.

The initial idea was to incorporate Fulda into Mainz. The 8^th century archbishop Lullus had already tried this on the back of Fulda’s link to St. Boniface but was ultimately rebuffed. In the centuries that followed the emperors kept supporting Fulda against the incursions of Mainz, largely because Fulda kept sending money and soldiers to the emperor. And whilst many other royal monasteries found themselves incorporated into bishoprics or territorial principalities, Fulda kept going and in 1220 the abbot of Fulda was made an imperial prince.  

A great opportunity to turn this around came in 1247. To explain, we need a bit of context.

We are back in the final years of the last Hohenstaufen emperor, Frederick II, episode 89 to 91. Pope and emperor have entered their final battle and the pope was winning.

The archbishop of Mainz was Siegfried III of Eppstein. He was the most significant of the four members of the Eppstein family who occupied the archepiscopal seat of Mainz for 77 years in the period from 1200 to 1305. He had taken over from his uncle in 1230. Though the Eppsteins had risen to power in Mainz with the support of the Welf Otto IV, they had quickly switched sides when Frederick II appeared on the scene and had been supporters of the Hohenstaufen for almost 3 decades. But when Frederick II was excommunicated in 1241, they switched sides again and joined the pope against the emperor.

The pope was grateful and declared the abbot of Fulda incapacitated and made Siegried III the administrator of the Abbey and its huge territory. So, step one in gaining the land-bridge to Erfurt was achieved.

The next step was to crown Heinrich Raspe, the landgrave of Thuringia as king and future emperor. In part this was on Pope Innocent IV’s behalf, but there might have been a territorial calculus at play. If Heinrich Raspe succeeded and Frederick II and his sons were defeated, the new king might give his benefactor in Mainz some of the land he controlled between Mainz and Erfurt.

All seemed to be going swimmingly for our ambitious archbishop, until Heinrich Raspe died from wounds received in a battle against the Hohenstaufen in 1247, just a year after his coronation.

Heinrich Raspe was the last of the Ludowigers, the landgraves of Thuringia. The landgraves controlled a large territory stretching from Naumburg to Wetzlar, effectively a large part of modern-day Thuringia and the northern part of the Bundesland Hessen.

Now that the landgrave was dead, all this territory was up for grabs.

Even though we are in the allegedly lawless Middle Ages, the idea that someone could just go and take some land without any justification, be it a contract or inheritance or imperial charter, was simply not possible. Some of the claims were flimsy, but everyone had the decency of at least making something up.

As for Siegfried of Mainz, his claim was that much of the lands in Northern Hesse and Thuringia had been in the ownership of his archbishopric since the day of saintly Boniface. The only reason the landgraves controlled it was down to the Vogt or advocacy rights granted to the landgraves in the past. But now that the landgraves had died out, the advocacy rights should revert back to the archbishopric.

Then there were other contenders for the inheritance of the great landgraves., first amongst them Heinrich der Erlauchte, Henry the Venerable, margrave of Meissen, member of the house of Wettin (episode 107 if you are interested). Heinrich der Erlauchte had an awful lot going for him. First up, his mother was the daughter of Landgrave Hermann I of Thuringia and the sister of the last landgrave, Heinrich Raspe. He was also the grandson of Frederick Barbarossa and a faithful supporter of the Hohenstaufen. Hence the emperor Frederick II had already enfeoffed him with the landgraviate of Thuringia should Heinrich Raspe die without heir.

But Frederick II was excommunicated, so what does it matter that he had already made a decision. Enter stage left the third set of contenders, Sophie of Brabant and her son Heinrich.

Sophie of Brabant had been born Sophie of Thuringia. And not only was her father the older brother of Heinrich Raspe and his predecessor as landgrave, her mother was even more significant, her mother was a saint, and not any odd saint, but Saint Elisabeth of Thuringia or Saint Elisabeth of Hungary, one of the most revered saints of the 13^th century. And whatever you think about saints, in the 13^th century that can go a long way.

I produced an entire bonus episode on Elisabeth you can listen to if you have signed up on Patreon or on my website.

But in broad brushes. Elizabeth was the daughter of king Andreas of Hungary and at the age of 4 was betrothed to Ludwig, the future landgrave of Thuringia. As was customary, she grew up in her future husband’s household, which was one of the greatest chivalric courts in the empire, full of tournaments, dances and Minnesänger. Wagner created a whole opera about that court. When Elisabeth was seven, her mother, who had organised her marriage, was brutally murdered. That made her politically worthless as a bride.

Still living on the Wartburg, she was subjected to all sorts of abuse and bullying by courtiers and members of her intended husband’s family who were trying to get rid of her. At which point all that chivalry rang a bit hollow to her. She avoided going to the grand festivities and instead focused on charitable work. This made her even less suitable as a bride for one of the great princes of the realm, but Ludwig did the decent thing and married her anyway.

They had three children, a boy and two daughters. Sophie was the middle child. As time progressed, Elisabeth’s focus on helping the poor became her preoccupation. She admired Saint Francis of Assisi and his commitment to poverty and charity. When her husband set out for a crusade and died at Brindisi (episode 77), she fell under the spell of a new spiritual rector, who turned out to be a religious sadist, Konrad of Marburg. He made her swear off the world and give away her entire property to the building of hospitals and to feed the hungry. Stripped of their income, Elizabeth and her children lived more and more like beggars, suffering hunger and depravation. The great countess of Thuringia worked as a mere nurse in the great hospital she had built in Marburg, going around in the simplest of clothes, doing good works. And she underwent extreme religious exercises and possibly beatings by Konrad of Marburg.

Having not only the dowager countess living like a peasant but also her children, including the heir to the landgraviate living in a pigsty was a political impossibility. That is why the aforementioned Heinrich Raspe, Elisabeth’s brother-in-law, had her children, including the heir to the landgraviate, removed from her care. Heinrich Raspe sidelined Sophie’s brother, the true heir to the landgraviate, and officially succeeded him when the young man died in 1241.

Elisabeth died aged just 24 when Sophie was 7. Already during her lifetime, the fame of Elisabeth as a holy woman was spreading far and wide. She died in 1231 and already by 1235 she was declared a saint. In 1236, in one of the great displays of medieval faith, her body was laid to rest in a specifically built chapel in Marburg. Her pallbearers were the greatest princes of the realm, led by the emperor Frederick II himself.

As for Sophie, she was shipped off to marry Duke Henry of Brabant when she was 17 years of age, the same year her brother had died. That was not an advantageous marriage as the duke of Brabant already had six children and an heir.

What I want to say is that Sophie’s upbringing had been tough, more than tough. Suffering hunger and poverty, watching your mother living in a deeply toxic relationship with a religious fanatic, being taken away by an evil uncle and shunted out of the way after her brother had suddenly died was a lot to take in. And on top of that seeing all this extreme adoration for her mother who probably had little time for Sophie and was by all accounts the reason for her difficult life. God knows what that does to a person. And nobody at the time wrote it down.

What the chroniclers did mention however was her toughness and determination, and specifically her key determination was to provide for her only son, Henry. The death of her uncle Heinrich Raspe in 1247, when little Henry was just 3 years old, was the one great chance she had to secure him a principality.

Did she have a legal claim to the landgraviate of Thuringia? Well, sort of. She was the daughter of one of the pervious landgraves, which was on par with Henry the Venerable’s claim that derived from Heinrich Raspe’s sister.

Under the Mainzer Landfrieden, this conflict should have been brought before the imperial court to decide or arbitrate. But in 1247 there were two imperial courts, one of an excommunicated emperor and another by an anti-king only some of the princes recognised. So, there may as well have been none.

We have three claimants to the landgraviate, the archbishop of Mainz, Heinrich der Erlauchte, the margrave of Meissen, and Sophie of Brabant on behalf of her son also Heinrich. And with no court to file for probate, it was “first come, first served”.

Heinrich Raspe had died on February 16^th, 1247. Three weeks later the archbishop Siegfried Eppstein of Mainz is up in Fritzlar and appoints episcopal administrators for various bits of the landgravial territories.

In May 1247 Sophie of Brabant shows up in Marburg together with her husband and takes control of the lands between Kassel and Wetzlar, an area that at this point was already called the county of Hesse.  She might have progressed up to the Wartburg, the main residence of the Landgraves and tried to take possession of the whole of the landgraviate, though this is unclear.

There are two stories about how she took control. One is that she simply appeared in Marburg with her little boy, went to the market square, held him up and declared that he, the grandson of Saint Elisabeth and the benign landgrave Ludwig, should be acclaimed as the new landgrave and count of Hesse. Everybody clapped and then the estates of Hesse, the nobles and cities of the land approved the young man in his title. In 1989 the city of Marburg set up a statue that depicted exactly this event.

That story is likely a fabrication, since there were no estates of Hesse at the time. However, there is an element of truth to it in as much as the local powers approved the takeover by the Brabanters.

Let’s consider what these territorial lordships actually were. At this stage they consisted in a bundle of rights. There were manors and estates the lord owned outright. Then there were fiefs he held from the emperor as well as advocacies from bishoprics and monasteries. Cities that recognised an overlord on the basis that one of his predecessors had founded them. And then there were the regalia, the imperial rights to mint coins, collect tolls and taxes, build castles and so forth that had gradually transferred to a territorial lord. All these rights were interwoven, shared and dispersed between various other holders of power, local nobles, monasteries, neighbouring princes etc… So, when we look at these neat maps that delineate one princely territory from the next, they are pretty much all inaccurate before the 18^th century. Every piece of land was subject to particular rights and privileges of this guy or that guy. All these colour shading means is that prince x held more rights in this place than anyone else.  

One can imagine what happens when the princely family dies out. All these various partial rights holders will at a minimum demand confirmation of their existing rights or scramble to extend them. They will produce all sorts of documents confirming this or that, some true, others false or superseded. For the incoming claimant to the inheritance the question is then whether to accept or challenge these claims. If you accept you end up with a thinner bundle of rights than your predecessors, if you challenge, you end up with a feud, or worst case, nothing at all because another contender is happy to sign the papers and beats you.

Which means that to gain control of a territory depends very much on finding an equitable settlement with the powers that be, the nobles, cities, monasteries and other power brokers.

Sophie seemed to have been very successful at this kind of diplomacy. Because her takeover of Hesse was exceptionally smooth. She did grant a wide range of privileges to the various counts and knights in the territory, guaranteed the city of Kassel its privileges and so forth.

And she had another ace up her sleeve, her mother. It would simply be anachronistic to brush over the fact that she was the daughter of a saint and the proposed heir the grandson of the great benefactor of the poor.  And that descendance from Saint Elisabeth resonated particularly well with a very special group of people inside the city of Marburg, the Teutonic Knights.

The Teutonic Knights were deeply interwoven with Elisabeth of Hungary and her family. Elisabeth was made a patron saint of the order alongside the Virgin and St. George. The church of Saint Elizabeth in Marburg, where the saint is buried was built and run by the Teutonic Order. Elisbeth’s brother-in-law, Conrad had joined the Teutonic Knights and had given them land in Marburg where they built their headquarters, which remained the overall headquarters until they transferred to the Marienburg in Prussia almost 100 years later.

As far as the Teutonic Knights were concerned it was clear that no one, but the grandson of their patron saint should be master of the city of Marburg and lord of Hessen.

Meanwhile Sophie’s cousin, Heinrich der Erlauchte of Meissen had a more difficult time to assert his position in the heartlands of Thuringia around Eisenach, Gotha and Naumburg. He went down the route of challenging the claims of his new vassals rather than accept them.  Hence, he had to fight for about three years before he could take control of the eastern part of the landgraviate. But in the end, he did.

So, by 1250 it looked as if things were settled. The archbishop had picked up a bunch of territories between Fritzlar and Hersfeld. Sophie of Brabant on behalf of little Heinrich had taken the western part, the county of Hesse between Marburg and Kassel. And Heinrich der Erlauchte had taken the eastern half, the Thuringian bit.

But it only looks like that. All three parties still maintained their claims on the whole. It is another three body problem.

Sophie has now two options. Her position was very stable. She could go after the whole of the landgraviate, try to remove Heinrich der Erlauchte first from the Wartburg and then the rest of the lands, or she could go after the lands the archbishop of Mainz had occupied. But she could not do both. And if she wanted to achieve either, she was best served to team up with one of the others.

Sophie chose to team up with her cousin Heinrich der Erlauchte against Mainz. The two parties made an agreement whereby the margrave of Meissen recognised the little boy Heinrich as count of Hesse and in return Sophie made Heinrich der Erlauchte the little boy’s guardian and regent. Together they then decided to push back against Mainz which had taken lands and territories not only in Hesse, but in Thuringia as well.

Part of this effort was military. Heinrich der Erlauchte forced the Mainz administrators out and devastated the lands of the archbishop around Erfurt and Fritzlar. These destructive raids were a classic element of aristocratic feuds. The purpose was to reduce the opponent’s resources and force him to the negotiation table.

The other leg was political.

These prince bishoprics had a fundamental vulnerability in particular during the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th century. The procedure to appoint a new archbishop was not settled. Traditionally bishops, including the bishop of Rome were chosen by the whole congregation. During the early Middle Ages that right transitioned to the cathedral chapters and the college of cardinals. And finally, during the imperial and the Avignon papacy, the pope claimed the exclusive right to appoint bishops and archbishops. Plus, the pope demanded huge payments upon election, usually the first full year income of the bishopric.

We talked about the opposition in the German church against the papacy and its impact on imperial policy when we discussed the reign of Ludwig the Bavarian. But it also had a major impact on the way the ecclesiastical territories developed.

Given there were two legitimate ways to become archbishop, either election by the cathedral chapter or papal appointment, interested parties could intervene on either side to place a candidate of their liking on to a vacant seat. What we find throughout this period is that strong bishops and archbishops are followed by either weak ones or a schism between two competing contenders. And these periods of weakness are when the territorial princes pounce.

That is what happened here. When the aggressive and competent Siegfried II of Eppstein died in 1249, his successor as archbishop, Christian of Weisenau was a weak man. And he lasted barely two years before he was made to resign. His successor, Gerhard, Wildgraf von Daun got into big trouble right from the start and was excommunicated twice, once for blackmail and then for being disobedient. Then he was captured by some other enemies, twice, spending much of his reign in various prison cells.

Heinrich der Erlauchte ruthlessly exploited the situation and forced Mainz to return all the advocacies and right in Thuringia. But what he did not do was force Mainz to return these rights in Hesse as well.

This was very much a breach of the alliance between Sophie and Heinrich der Erlauchte. And what made things worse for the budding land of Hesse was that there was now a new archbishop, Werner of Eppstein, nephew of Siegfried and a much more forceful character than his predecessors.

Sophie now stood alone against Mainz and Heinrich der Erlauchte. So, she sought a new ally, a neighbour to the north, the duke of Brunswick, who also happened to be her son-in-law. Sophie and the duke decided to go after her cousin’s lands in Thuringia. They occupied the Wartburg and Eisenach. But the two sons of Heinrich der Erlauchte, Albrecht and Dietrich hit back hard. They took the Wartburg back and entered Eisenach where they massacred Sophie’s garrison and supporters.

Sophie returned back to Marburg tail between legs. At which point the archbishop Werner of Eppstein though it was his time to have a go. He excommunicated the daughter of Saint Elisabeth and put the whole county under interdict. And then hostilities began that lasted 2 years.

Sophie had built various fortifications for exactly this eventuality. One of them, the Frauenberg or women’s mountain near Marburg became the key to the war. Sophie and her now adult son held the castle throughout that time, whilst the land of Hesse went up in flames.  In the end, neither side could win militarily.

The war concluded thanks to the diplomatic skills the young count Heinrich von Hessen had inherited some of his mother. He brought more and more allies of the archbishop over to his side.

In 1264 the three parties were exhausted and settled their differences. Everybody recognised young Heinrich as Lord of Hesse, the archbishop gave up his rights in both Hesse and Thuringia and Heinrich der Erlauchte handed over a couple of cities to the newly created state of Hesse.

Heinrich von Hessen continued with his combination of military force and diplomacy, expanding his territory more and more. In 1292 king Adolf of Nassau did the deed and elevated the Landgraves of Hesse to imperial princes.

Over the next 200 years these two entities, the archbishop of Mainz and the Landgrave of Hesse would clash again and again. Mainz kept acquiring castles and villages across Hesse in their attempts to build a land bridge to Erfurt and the Landgraves of Hessen expanded their territory westwards. Ultimately the landgraves were more successful, coming as far southwest as Darmstadt.

And this is a story that repeated itself again and again across the empire. The bishops and abbots lost more and more rights and lands to the territorial rulers, and many were mediated, meaning they lost their independence and were subsumed into the princely territories.

And that happened even before the Reformation when many of the prince bishoprics became temporal principalities, like famously the land of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia.

As we have seen in the case of Mainz versus Hessen, there are a number of reasons for that.

One was that the bishops and the archbishop of Mainz were tied into wide ranging political conflicts across the empire and within the church, which, to use a modern term, led to management overstretch.

But the biggest problem was the competition between cathedral chapter and papacy over the right to choose the bishops. The cathedral chapter was staffed with the sons of the local powerful families who were trying to put candidates up who would help their relatives. The papacy was trying to preserve the power of the archbishops but did not know enough about the candidates and local politics. That resulted in either the selection of the lowest common denominator or the selection of two rival candidates. For almost the entire period 1328 and 1419, there were two contenders for the see of the primate of Germany fighting it out. And these conflicts were a perfect time for the greedy neighbours, the landgraves of Hessen, the counts of Nassau and the counts Palatinate on the Rhine to expand their territory at the expense of the archbishops.

All this culminates in the Mainzer Stiftsfehde of 1461/62 which we will discuss towards the end of this series.

But next week we will move to more uplifting topics. And since we were in Mainz, we will talk about the greatest gift the city had made to the world, the printing press. We will talk about who Gutenberg was, how he developed his great invention, how it spread, and how it changed the world. I hope you will join us again.

The Holy roman empire on the Threshold to the early modern period

I typed “What does a typical German town look like” into Perplexity.ai and it came up with half-timbered houses, cobbled streets and alleys, medieval architecture, greenery and decorations and regional variations. And that is not half bad, unless you come to Berlin, Hamburg, Munich or Cologne in search of any of the above. But at some point in time even Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Cologne were full of half-timbered houses on cobbled streets and alleys overlooked by medieval churches and town halls. And some of the smaller cities, like Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Nördlingen, Idstein, Miltenberg, Lübeck, Esslingen and literally hundreds more do indeed have all of the above features.

But these are very rarely medieval. In fact most of these half-timbered houses and even the city walls date from the 15^th  and 16^th century, not from the  High Middle Ages in the 12^th and 13^th century.

Many German histories skip over this period in order to get to the Reformation, which is a shame. Because the 15^th century did not just shape the physical appearance of the country, but much of its geographical and mental make-up.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans – Season 10 – The Empire in the 15^th Century.

I typed “What does a typical German town look like” into Perplexity.ai and it came up with half-timbered houses, cobbled streets and alleys, medieval architecture, greenery and decorations and regional variations. And that is not half bad, unless you come to Berlin, Hamburg, Munich or Cologne in search of any of the above. But at some point in time even Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Cologne were full of half-timbered houses on cobbled streets and alleys overlooked by medieval churches and town halls. And some of the smaller cities, like Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Nördlingen, Idstein, Miltenberg, Lübeck, Esslingen and literally hundreds more do indeed have all of the above features.

But these are very rarely medieval. In fact most of these half-timbered houses and even the city walls date from the 15^th  and 16^th century, not from the  High Middle Ages in the 12^th and 13^th century.

Many German histories skip over this period in order to get to the Reformation, which is a shame. Because the 15^th century did not just shape the physical appearance of the country, but much of its geographical and mental make-up.

This is the time when the empire reaches its most challenging phase. This is not the difficult second album, this is more Tina Turner in 1982 when her cover of shame, shame, shame reached #47 in the Netherlands charts. The emperors Sigismund and Frederick III may have been blessed with extremely long reigns, but did not bless the empire much with their presence. They spent their time mostly abroad, in Hungary and Bohemia, or in their personal territories, though with good reason.

For the first time since Otto the Great, the empire is subjected to a sustained threat from outside forces. The last invasion, the one by the Mongols, had been terrifying but mercifully brief. Now a more patient and more persistent conqueror was slowly advancing up the Balkans, the Ottomans. They were still 800km from Vienna, but 40 years earlier they had been 1,200km away.

Meanwhile the empire’s Christian neighbors, the Poles, the emerging dukes of Burgundy, the kings of France, the Venetians, the Milanese and the Scandinavian kingdoms were nibbling away at the territory of the empire, whilst the Swiss were wondering off into the Alpine Glow. The great 14^th century emperor Karl IV had already given away much of the old kingdom of the Arelat, and his son Sigismund was in no position to halt the erosion in what is today’s Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg.

On the positive side, the great western schism that had burdened the catholic church first with two and then three competing popes had ended at the council of Constance thanks in no small part to the efforts of emperor Sigismund. But this great gathering of all of Christendom and its successor council at Basel had failed to deliver on its second task, the reform of the church. This inability to stamp out at least the worst excesses of ecclesiastical greed and debauchery had tipped the Bohemian reformers into a revolution, a revolution that not only lasted 16 years, but one that prove impossible to defeat militarily. It is unclear how much resonance the radical reform ideas of the Hussites had outside Czechia, but they were a sign of things to come.

With the emperors absent and the church still in deep disarray, the ball was firmly in the court of the territorial princes.

This is where we see the beginnings of actual states and state bureaucracies developing in Germany. But in a very different way to similar trends occurring in the more consolidated kingdoms of France and England. These territorial states were a whole lot smaller and a lot more fragile, which posed some unique challenges.

First up. If you are small, the question is how do you get bigger. We will look at some key players, the archbishop of Mainz, the landgraves of Hesse, the margraves of Baden and the dukes of Württemberg to see how that can and had been done. And within this sits the question of what happened to the cities. We will look at how Würzburg tried to achieve its ambition to become a free city. Then there are the imperial knights, their military role changing and their independence threatened, trying to find new ways to remain relevant and in the process develop some seriously cool outfits.

If you were a successful territorial ruler, the next challenge was to produce a male heir or more precisely the right number of male heirs. You needed at least one growing up to manhood and survive the wars and diseases to make sure your principality would continue to exist, but you did not want too many spares so that you had to divide it up into ever smaller entities. We will look at the duchy of Brunswick to understand the inherent problems and the coping mechanisms the princely families developed. And then we will look at the Wittelsbachs who provide a great example of “how not to do it” as well as a lovely story about what happens when the precious heir falls for the wrong woman.

Growing your territory in the empire was one way to glory. But there were alternative options, options that became almost a standing feature. The princely families of the empire turned into a near inexhaustible reservoir from where to pluck a king, should you happen to have mislaid the previous monarch or are in need of a new one. Over the centuries, German princes would ascend the thrones of Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Poland, of course my homeland of Blighty, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria and probably some more I have forgotten. Basically everywhere except for France and Italy. That process was established then and we will look into it in more detail when we discuss Pomerania and Oldenburg.

We will also touch on the great wars of the period, wars between alliances of princes, cities and knight’s associations. And these were the Bavarian war, the Mainzer Stiftsfehde, the war of the Princes and the Soester Stiftsfehde. Never heard of them? Do not worry, you are not alone. Some were straightforward wars over who owns what territory, but one, the largest of them, was over the system of appeals in the imperial law courts – go figure. We will hear all about of these wars, about a victorious Count Palatinate on the Rhine and a fellow elector they dubbed the German Achilles.

All that sounds somewhat depressing and another festival of blood and gore. But despite all this strife and feuding, this is also a time of great discovery. Gutenberg invented the printing press, a technology that would undermine the authority of the Catholic church, fan the flames which led to the Reformation, create the communications infrastructure needed for the rise of modern science and even – if Neil Postman is to be believed – lead to the invention of childhood as an extended, protected phase in the lives of young people.

Like the internet and social media, the printing press demanded new types of content: maps, encyclopedias, fiction, political pamphlets and engravings, opening the world up to the world. More universities are founded in this period than at any other time before the 1960s, churning out not just priests, but lawyers, writers and intellectuals. All these territorial princes, bishops, abbots, city councils and rich merchants demand art and architecture to celebrate their achievements and pieces made from silver and gold to amaze their guests, whilst alchemists worked deep in the bowels of castles trying to turn base metal into gold and inventing chemistry in the process.

And funding all this, the tournaments, the universities, the art and the wars were the peasants, whose conditions may be subject to debate, but whose anger becomes ever more palpable.

And all that might finally get us to  a point where these people speaking a similar language and participating in a similar culture developed a notion of being German.. you know I am skeptical about these things, but maybe it is now time to discuss it…

I am still working on the details of the schedule, but the idea is to alternate between political history and cultural, social and economic history, whilst the link from episode to episode will be geographical. We will see whether we can pull that off, but given the wealth of material, it should definitely be interesting.

If you are craving a more linear storyline to complement what is going on here, I would like to direct you to what is rapidly becoming one of my favourite history podcasts, the History of Venice. It is well thought through and beautifully presented. Simon and Jess are deeply involved with their subject and will walk you through the fascinating story of the city on the lagoon. And the good news is, they are only on episode 18, so very easy to catch up with and join what is promising to be a great ride.

As for us here, the new season “The Empire in the 15^th Century” kicks off next Thursday with an episode about the appearance of the landgraviate of Hesse and why this mad ethe archbishop of Mainz very disappointed, and the archbishop of Mainz did not like to be disappointed.

See you next week.

And in case you are wondering about the delay in today’s episode, I had a serious audio software issue that distorted the first version so badly I had to delete it before it got distributed too widely. Apologies for that.

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A story of slander

Barbara ist geil und ruchlos is the title of a 17^th century description of emperor Sigismund’s second wife, Barbara of Celje and it goes on as follows:

“Barbara, was a German Messalina, a woman of insatiable lust; so nefarious / that she had no god / nor angel nor devil / nor heaven nor hell/that she believed in.

When her handmaidens  fasted and prayed / she scolded them / that they tortured their bodies / to worship a fictitious god.

Instead she admonished them / in her good Sardanapalian way / that they should in every way enjoy the pleasures of this life / because after this  there is no other to be hoped for.

This godless harlot / sought paradise on this foul earth in doglike lust / although she was already close to 60 years of age.” End quote.

But this is not where it ends. The Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu described her end, in an abandoned church in Styria thus:

“The features, though a hundred and fifty years had passed since her funeral, were tinted with the warmth of life. Her eyes were open; no cadaverous smell exhaled from the coffin. The two medical men, one officially present, the other on the part of the promoter of the inquiry, attested the marvelous fact, that there was a faint but appreciable respiration, and a corresponding action of the heart. The limbs were perfectly flexible, the flesh elastic; and the leaden coffin floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches, the body lay immersed. Here then were all the admitted signs and proofs of vampirism. The body, therefore, in accordance with the ancient practice, was raised, and a sharp stake driven through the heart of the vampire, who uttered a piercing shriek at the moment, in all respects as might escape from a living person in the last agony. Then the head was struck off, and a torrent of blood flowed from the severed neck. The body and head were next placed on a pile of wood, and reduced to ashes, which were thrown upon the river and borne away, and that territory has never since been plagued by the visits of a vampire.“

Excellent – HotGPod has its first sexually charged lesbian vampire…I suggest we take a bite at the reality of that story.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 184: Barbara of Celje, the German Messalina, which also episode 21 of Season 9: The Reformation before the Reformation.

Barbara ist geil und ruchlos is the title of a 17^th century description of emperor Sigismund’s second wife, Barbara of Celje and it goes on as follows:

“Barbara, was a German Messalina, a woman of insatiable lust; so nefarious / that she had no god / nor angel nor devil / nor heaven nor hell/that she believed in.

When her handmaidens  fasted and prayed / she scolded them / that they tortured their bodies / to worship a fictitious god.

Instead she admonished them / in her good Sardanapalian way / that they should in every way enjoy the pleasures of this life / because after this  there is no other to be hoped for.

This godless harlot / sought paradise on this foul earth in doglike lust / although she was already close to 60 years of age.” End quote.

But this is not where it ends. The Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu described her end, in an abandoned church in Styria thus:

“The features, though a hundred and fifty years had passed since her funeral, were tinted with the warmth of life. Her eyes were open; no cadaverous smell exhaled from the coffin. The two medical men, one officially present, the other on the part of the promoter of the inquiry, attested the marvelous fact, that there was a faint but appreciable respiration, and a corresponding action of the heart. The limbs were perfectly flexible, the flesh elastic; and the leaden coffin floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches, the body lay immersed. Here then were all the admitted signs and proofs of vampirism. The body, therefore, in accordance with the ancient practice, was raised, and a sharp stake driven through the heart of the vampire, who uttered a piercing shriek at the moment, in all respects as might escape from a living person in the last agony. Then the head was struck off, and a torrent of blood flowed from the severed neck. The body and head were next placed on a pile of wood, and reduced to ashes, which were thrown upon the river and borne away, and that territory has never since been plagued by the visits of a vampire. “

Excellent – HotGPod has its first sexually charged lesbian vampire…I suggest we take a bite at the reality of that story.

But before we start just a quick reminder that this show remains free of bloodsucking advertisers or paywalls. The History of the Germans is free for everyone to enjoy uninterrupted thanks to the generosity of our patrons who have gone to historyofthegermans.com/support and have either signed up for a membership or for a one-time donation. And our special thanks go to: Greg Dux, Brian W., Christine, Mine Spot, Ghill Donald (like the fish), Beth B., Mickeymarbh and Matthew G. who have already signed up.

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And with that, back to the show.

The subject of all these lurid stories is Barbara of Celje, the second wife of our long standing emperor Sigismund.

She was born in 1390, the daughter of count Hermann II of Celje. The counts of Celje were a family on its way up. They had started out as nobles of Soun, vassals of the dukes of Styria based on their castle of Sanneck, in modern day Slovenia.  They expanded their position and were elevated to counts in the 14^th. By the beginning of the 15^th century they had acquired material possessions in Hungary. And their position in the European nobility had received a boost. They were now related to the royal house of Bosnia and Barbara’s cousin Anna was married to king Jogaila of Poland.

During the long conflict that brought Sigismund to the throne of Hungary, the counts of Celje sided with the Garai family, the leaders of one of the three main factions. They initially supported Sigismund’s mother-in-law, the formidable Elisabeth but after having more or less caused her death in 1386, they rallied behind Sigismund. Episode 169 if you want to wade through that sea of murder and misery again.

As we know Sigismund’s reign in Hungary remained unstable during these first decades. In 1401 his magnates had lost patience with him and his attempts to centralize the kingdom, favoring foreigners for top jobs and spending a lot of time in Bohemia. They captured him and locked him up in a castle.

But then there was the question, what to do next. They were disappointed with Sigismund, but there wasn’t any ready alternative they could all agree on. So they did what you would always do in the middle ages, tie everything together in marriage alliances. Nicolas Garai married Anna of Celje and her sister Barbara married Sigismund. That arrangement made the head of the most powerful faction in the empire the brother-in-law of the king whilst one of the country’s richest landowners became his father-in-law.

This alliance of Garai, Celje and Sigismund kept the other parties down, in particular since their heads, John Lakfi and John Horvati were both dead and their possessions distributed amongst Sigismund’s followers.

Still Sigismund had married down, the son of an emperor sharing his bed with a girl whose great grandfather may have been a simple knight for all we know. How bad this was can be seen in the assessment by Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini, the future pope Pius II and someone well versed with imperial politics. quote: “Many thought it was monstrous since a king who married a countess married beneath his station. Moreover, at that time, the counts of Cilly were neither powerful nor illustrious, as they are now, for they were considered to be subject to the House of Austria. But Sigismund, who at the time was not very fond of the House of Austria, separated these counts from Austria and made them free and illustrious princes. This matter became the beginning and reason for many conflicts.” End quote.

Despite the difference in status, the happy couple was otherwise very well matched.

Here is how Piccolimini described the groom: quote “Sigismund was a man of distinguished stature, with shining eyes, a large forehead, pleasantly rosy cheeks, a long and plentiful beard, and a great mind.” Unquote. He was a tall and slim man and he emphasised his height by wearing a rather unusual fur cap. I am a bit at a loss how to describe this particular garment, but it was a fairly tall, round hat with enormous flaps on both sides and another, even more enormous front flap that was always folded upwards. This fancy gear must have made him even taller than he already was.

The advantage of wearing something nobody else did is that we can recognise Sigismund in many images from the time that weren’t meant to be portraits. Meister Francke’s  painting cycle of St. Barbara that was made for a trading city way up north in Finland very clearly shows Sigismund as the stern father of a gorgeous but sartorially deprived Barbara. As a very weird coincidence, we had discussed this picture already once here, way back in episode 127 – the Art and Culture of the Hanse though without me noticing the link to Sigismund.

 And about his wife the future pope said: quote: “Barbara was a beautiful woman, tall, white, but with some face blemishes. She ardently sought beauty. Unquote. As for sartorial quirks, there are various websites etc. that claim she wore black dresses and black gloves at all times. There is no evidence for that in any contemporary source nor in the confirmed depictions of her. Apparently she was just wearing what suited her, and judging by the imagery, quite a lot did suit her quite well.

Thus two very beautiful spouses were united. When exactly they got married is unclear. But if she was born in 1390, the earliest date for the consummation of the marriage would have been her 12^th birthday, i.e., sometime in 1402. By that time her groom was already 32.

Sigismund, as we know from episode 169 did not have anything resembling a pleasant childhood. From the age of 11 he had been thrown into the snake pit that was Hungarian politics from which he emerged victorious after all his adversaries, male and female had come to an equally untimely as unpleasant end.

Getting married to much older and emotionally distant husband wasn’t anything unusual in this period. An aristocratic girl should not expect anything else. Here is our friend Piccolomini again: quote “He was passionate but inconstant, clever in speech, fond of wine, ardent in love, guilty of a thousand adulteries, quick to anger and ready to forgive. He did not hoard money but spent prodigiously. He promised more than he kept, and often dissimulated.”

Not a dreamboat, in particular if you add the deformation of his jaw that prevented him from closing his mouth. Still it seemed the two of them got on reasonably well.

Their first and only child, Elisabeth was born in 1409, already several years into the marriage. There would not be any more children despite sexual relations between husband and wife continuing with interruptions throughout their marriage. We obviously have no medical records, though we know that Sigismund suffered severely from gout which can negatively affect fertility. There are also no records of illegitimate sons from his innumerable affairs.

Some of Sigismund’s commentaries suggest that he was not expecting any more offspring after Elisabeth had been born, though he gave no further details.

One thing in which the couple differed quite dramatically was in their approach to money. As the queen of Hungary she had received a number of castles as her dower, as her personal property. Barbara was always very careful with her property. The overwhelming majority of documents that can be ascribed to her personally were demands for payment of dues and taxes sent to the various towns and villages she owned. Sigismund on the other had was always completely broke He was so down on his luck that at some point he pawned his crowns, his Order of the Garter, even his clothes. He rarely paid his courtiers and officers in cash. Instead he granted them lands and rights to the extent such was still available. The biggest such payout was to his close friend, the burggrave Frederick of Zollern who he made Margrave of Brandenburg and a Prince elector to pay off his enormous debts.

When he met Pope Eugene IV in Rome, he allegedly told him, “Holy Father, we are dissimilar in three ways and similar in other three: You sleep in the morning, I get up before dawn. You drink water, I drink wine. You flee women, I pursue them. But we are similar in this that you pour out the money of the Church, while I keep nothing for myself. You have bad hands, and I have bad feet. You destroy the Church, and I the Empire.”

One of the rather unusual dynamics that developed between Barbara and Sigismund was that she lent him money, and as time went by and Barbara became ever richer, the sums she lent him and the mining rights, taxes and properties she collected as security for these loans grew larger and larger in scale.  

Another point of difference between husband and wife was their relationship to the Habsburgs. The Counts of Celje had originally been vassals of the Habsburgs and they let Barbara and her family feel their inferior status at every opportunity. This was not just a source of irritation, but had also some material political implications. As we know Albrecht of Habsburg was Sigismund’s designated successor and was slated to marry their only child and heiress of the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary. At the same time the Celjes and Garais were essential for Sigismund’s rule of Hungary.

Despite the political differences, Sigismund gave Barbara a material role in Hungarian politics. She often served as a member of the regency councils that he put in place during his regular absences and for some periods she ruled the country more or less on her own. Most modern historians try to make her out as a sensible and successful ruler during these periods, though looking at the evidence of what she actually did, I would judge it at best middle of the road. She was no Margarete Mautasch who held her lands against Karl IV, one of Europe’s greatest tactician of the times. But she wasn’t a disaster either, just average.

This has been going for 10 minutes now, so where is the Messalina and vampire part.

The moment when it allegedly all went pear shaped was around 1415. We are at the Council of Constance where Barbara acts as the first lady of europe. She was given a splendid entry into the city and participated in all the great festivities laid on to entertain the thousands of senior princes and prelates.

A French nobleman who lived next door to Barbara during the council tells us that Barbara kept an open house, where anyone was welcome to come and go, enjoy the musicians and comedians she had brought on. He points out that quote; “Nowhere in the world is a more indulgent husband than Sigismund who not only lets his wife do anything she wants, but actively encouraged her to take part in public dances, speak with everyone, and relate to people in such a  friendly way that some who do not know her would not consider her a queen but as a woman of some lowly trade” end quote.

M. de Montreuil who wrote this was a bit of a bigot and a touch creepy. He actually got Barbara’s chambermaid to show him the queen’s bedroom.

Next thing that happened was that in 1415 Sigismund sets off on his journey to convince the last reluctant pope, Pedro da Luna, to resign. Barbara in turn goes home to Hungary. And then, nothing. She did not have a political function for the next eight years. She issued only very few charters in the first three years, but was still able to do certain financial transactions. In 1419 she dropped off the face of the earth. It will take until 1423 that she reappears in her role as queen.

According to Sigismund’s chronicler, Eberhard Windeck, the king had received malicious rumours about Barbara’s conduct at Constance and had decided to banish her. Piccolomini’s take was more explicit: quote “[..] since Sigismund often fell in love with other women, she, too, began to love others, for a cheating husband makes a cheating wife.” End quote.

As to the alleged lovers, no names are given in contemporary sources, but Frederick I of Brandenburg and Sigismund’s close collaborator Jan Wallenrode had been listed as well as a third person, a knight called Johannes Wallenroth.

Royal adultery was no laughing matter. If there was doubt about the legitimacy of any or all of the royal children, civil war was almost the inevitable result. Accusations of infidelity were usually taken seriously and investigated. Barbara’s cousin Anna, the queen of Poland had been subjected to such a  process and acquitted.

So far, naughty, but not exactly Messalina.

After 1423 the royal couple seemed to be reconciled. They go on several diplomatic visits together and Sigismund endows her most generously with castles, towns and mining rights. Over the subsequent 14 years, thanks to careful management of her estates and Sigismund’s eternal need for ready cash, Barbara became one of the richest landowners in Hungary.

In 1436 Sigismund finally becomes the fully recognised king of Bohemia and she is crowned queen with full pomp and circumstances. But as we know Sigismund was not allowed to enjoy the summit of his ambitions for very long.

A few days before Sigismund’s death, Barbara gets arrested. Why and by whom is heavily contested.

One story is that Sigismund discovered a conspiracy whereby Barbara was planning to marry king Wladyslav III of Poland upon Sigismund’s death and pass the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary to the Poles, sidestepping Albrecht of Habsburg and her daughter Elisabeth.

The other version was that duke Albrecht of Habsburg, Sigismund’s official heir, had her arrested to rob her of her possessions and to remove a potential opponent to his rule.

Here is our friend Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini again with what happened next: After Sigismund’s death, Barbara wanted to go to Poland, bringing with her an immense [treasure of] gold and silver, but on the way, she was held up and plundered. Now she has some castles in the Kingdom of Bohemia that belong to the queen’s estate. There she lives, not like an empress but not in poverty. End quote

Albrecht seized all her 30 castles and copious lands which amounted to significant more in revenue than the whole of the royal demesne. She would never receive that back, and was only granted a small dower as queen of Bohemia.

She lived for another 14 years, until 1451, spending her time with alchemy, trying to regain her lost fortunes by turning copper into silver or gold.

Sad, but still no Messalina.

Over the centuries writers seeking a thrilling or titillating story embellished these rather meagre facts and created a veritable monster. Her one potential fling with an unknown knight in Constance became a string of lovers, lovers who often came to a sticky end. There are some similarities to the stories about Elisabeth Bathory, the other Hungarian alleged serial killer from the 17^th century.

The combination of sexual licentiousness and interest in alchemy coalesces in Carmilla, the very first vampire novel written in 1872, the one I quoted at the top of the episode.

In Croatia she is still known as the Black queen, on account of always wearing black and carrying a black raven on her shoulder. The story goes she had given her castle to the devil to protect her fortune and in the tunnels under the city she still resides as the snake queen.  

Moving away from the land of fables, the question is what really happened. Did she have an uncontrolled sex drive, or was it all politics.

Let’s start with the politics.

As we know Sigismund’s politics were extremely inconsistent. One day he was pursuing this objective with these allies and the other day, he was heading elsewhere. That was not entirely his fault, but was largely a function of the extremely convoluted political situation he found himself in.

As for Barbara, she was a lot more straightforward, in part because her main concern was Hungary and her family. She was arguong for a closer alliance with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its ruler, King Wladyslaw II, Jagiello. Why. One may argue that an alliance of Poland, Lithuania, Bohemia and Hungary was the best way to protect Hungary’s southern border against the rising Ottoman power. And she was opposed to a closer alliance with the Habsburgs. The latter was likely down to old family rivalry, but may also have been driven by personal animosity. We do not know, because she left no notes on her political thought.

As for Sigismund’s relationship with the Habsburgs, he did have a close link to Albrecht, the duke of Austria. So close in fact that little Elisabeth, barely a year old, was engaged to Albrecht. And if there was any consistency in Sigismund, it was his commitment to building Albrecht up as his successor.

Still, an engagement at such a young age was not much more than an option. Sigismund himself had been engaged to various noble ladies before he settled on Mary of Hungary when he was 6.

Therefore the Habsburg alliance wasn’t set and done until such time that Albrecht and Elisbeth would consume the marriage, which did eventually happen in 1422, once Elizabeth had turned 12. But in the meantime there was a lot of room for negotiations, and as we know, Albrecht had to pay the huge sum of 400,000 florins for his bride, money that went into the futile campaign in Bohemia.

It is therefore possible that Barbara had been exploring and supporting alternatives to the Habsburg marriage before 1422. Constance would have been a perfect stage to do that given the presence of dozens of princes and royal delegations, as well as prelates who could block and approve marriages on the basis of how closely related the bride and groom were.

So it is quite possible that the rift between Sigismund and Barbara had nothing to do with alleged infidelities, but actual political disagreements about who Elisabeth was going to marry. Once the marriage had been consumed and there was no way back, the couple could reconcile, which is what they did.

The second incident, the arrest in 1437 was a political act, irrespective which side one follows. I personally doubt that Barbara was indeed committed to marry king Wladyslaw III of Poland and disinherit her daughter. Apart from anything, the proposed groom was merely 13 years old at the time and she was 47. Not unheard of, but a bit far-fetched.

The idea that Albrecht had her arrested whilst concocting a conspiracy theory is a lot more credible. Albrecht needed Barbara’s castles and towns both to provide him with the financial resources to rule Hungary and for military strategic reasons. And Barbara would not have handed them over voluntarily.

A which point there emerges a good reason for the Habsburgs to damage Barbara’s reputation. Painting her as a cougar conspiring to satisfy her lust for a boy king of Poland was a great way to justify their illegal expropriation. And they did have a perfect weapon to do that with, our friend Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini, the future pope Pius II. This great humanist had been a close friend and supporter of the Habsburgs, in particular Albrecht’s cousin, the emperor Frederick III. Most of the lurid stories about Barbara can be traced back to Piccolomini and have been distributed by sources close to the Habsburgs.

So, she was framed.

That is at least what the vast majority of historians now believe.

There is however one last point that I would like to make. Many of these attempts to exonerate female figures in history have a habit of painting the victim of slander as a sober, almost prudish figure, focused on sensible matters.

I am not sure this is always true. In case of Barbara of Celje, she was clearly someone who enjoyed life, liked to dance, music, comedy and just conviviality.

And let’s put this into the context of the times. The court of Sigismund was a long, long way from Victorian England. He himself was clearly keen on all kinds of sexual adventures. And so were the people around him. His chancellors, Georg von Hohenlohe and Jan von Wallenrode were both bishops, but their behaviour was not exactly in line with the exigences of the ecclesiastical office. And then there is Kaspar Schlick. He was the son of a patrician from Eger, modern day Cheb. He had joined Sigismund’s entourage as a scribe and slowly but surely moved through the ranks before he became the very first ever chancellor not to be a prelate. He amassed a huge fortune in Sigismund’s service, some of it as direct donations, some as repayment of loans granted to the monarch at exorbitant interest and the rest through bribes and counterfeit documents. Towards the end of Sigismund’s life, the emperor arranged a marriage for his chancellor to a Silesian duchess and one of his own distant relatives. Five weeks before Sigismund’s death he was elevated to count of Bassano and prince of Wenden. And even after Sigismund passed away, “His versatile intellect and exceptional natural goodness made it possible for him to enjoy equal favour with three emperors of very different character.”.

What matters here is that Kaspar Schlick was not only an incredibly successful civil servant, but also a sponsor of our friend Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini who he helped to become bishop of Trieste which set him up for a career that ended up on the papal throne.

And in return, Piccolomini created a literary monument for his friend when he made him the main character of his book Historia de Duobus Amantibus. He is Euryalus, an imperial courtier and passionate lover of Lucretia, a married women in Siena. Let me give you a short excerpt from this rather unique work by a future pope: quote

“You are my Ganymede, my Hippolytus, my Diomedes,” said Lucretia.
“You are my Polyxena,” Euryalus replied, “my Emilia, you are Venus herself.”

Now he praised her lips, now her cheeks, now her eyes. At times, lifting the covering and revealing what he had never seen before, he gazed in admiration and said:

“I find more than I imagined. Just like this, Actaeon saw Diana bathing in the spring. What could be more beautiful than these limbs? What could be more radiant? I have already redeemed my perils—what is there that should not be endured for you?

O lovely chest! O breasts made to be pressed! Do I truly touch you? Do I hold you? Have you fallen into my hands?

O smooth limbs! O fragrant body!”

“Euryalus, where am I? Why did you not let me die? I would have died happy in your arms. Would that I could die like this before you leave this city!”

As they spoke these words, they made their way toward the bedroom, where they spent a night, we imagine, much like that of Paris and Helen after he carried her away to his high-prowed ships. That night was so delightful that both of them declared even Mars and Venus could not have known such joy.”

End quote.

That sheds not just some light on the youth of a pope who turned out to be a bit of a prude later on but also on the court of Sigismund. There was clearly a lot of partying going on there and it seems the women were participating with some level of enjoyment.

Is it therefore impossible to assume that Barbara did go out to have some fun too? She was an independently wealthy woman, backed by a powerful family without which Sigismund would be unable to rule Hungary, she beautiful, still just 25 years old and by then certain she would not conceive another child with Sigismund. So maybe she did believe that “they should in every way enjoy the pleasures of this life” as her enemies claimed.

All that is of course speculation. She did not leave any writings about what she did or did not do. But it is as much a viable speculation as the idea that she lived a life of an unimpeachable matron hoarding castles and riches.

After 30 minutes of talking about things we do not know, here is what we do know. The next season of the History of the Germans will begin on March 20^th with an episode about the most senior of the Prince Elector, the Primate of Germany, the Archbishop of Mainz. I hope you will join us again.

And in the meantime, remember that there are already 184 episodes of the History of the Germans, plus a brace of bonus episodes. And given I can barely remember what was in it, maybe you will enjoy listening to them again too. If I can recommend some, what about

• Episode 25 – Konrad II and the Construction of the empire,
• Episode 35 “to Rome, to Rome” about emperor Henry IV taking revenge for the humiliation before Canossa,
• Episode 47 Konrad’s Coup about the Hohenstaufen gaining the imperial throne,  
• Episode 59 The City of Straw about Barbarossa’s last and fateful Italian campaign,
• Episode 77 A Nail in the Coffin about Frederick II’s decision to let the empire be,
• Episode 101 Gottschalk and Adalbert about the formation of Mecklenburg,
• Episode 112 Grain and Beer about the Hanseatic trade in these commodities,
• Episode 130 The Conquest of Prussia by the Teutonic Knights, and
• Episode 146 Henry VII’s journey to Rome.

See you all on the other side and last thing, historyofthegermans.com/support is still available for anyone wanting to make a contribution.