by Ben Hopkins
It swiftly became clear that the battle had been lost. Von Kolzeck, upon hearing of the death of his beloved elder brother in the fray, lost what remained of his composure and confidence. His mind clouded with grief and confusion, his spirit broken by the sudden collapse of all his glorious plans, the Bishop became incapable of leadership.
Seeing their overlord overcome with incapacitating melancholy, his closest associates determined to sound the retreat. The Bishop and his retinue then turned and fled the shameful scene.
VULTURES
(ANNO 1262. BARON VOLMAR VON KRONTHAL VII)
After all that nonsense, it was over in a matter of moments. That fool Walther von Kolzeck sent his Knights a-charging before his footsoldiers were in proper formation. And the Knights charged well enough, a great phalanx of bright armour and glinting swords. Their pageboys must have been hard at work all night with oil and cloth to polish all that gleaming steel into a shine.
My back’s been hurting a while now, so I held off from the vanguard fray. But after the first wave of our Knights went out, I came hard behind. That young Count of Lichtenberg was making eyes at me, so I went right at him. We managed a few feints and parries, then I hit down hard on his left shoulder, a veritable blow.
But then the trumpet sounded and all chaos broke loose. Out came Habsburg’s common city dogs. I’ll credit them with blood and balls, no doubt about that, the way they rushed in amongst a great-hundred or more destriers and coursers, not to mention armoured Knights lashing out with sword and mace.
Count Lichtenberg’s horse reared and screamed, panicking wild. The young bastard nearly fell down there and then, but he caught his arm tight in the reins and brought the destrier to heel. They lurched back towards the Bishop’s camp, and I would have followed them to finish the fight, but already the battlefield was just a mess of blood and flailing horses.
What a vile sight. It was like a knacker’s yard, a slaughterhouse on Martinmas Eve. Fine stallions thrashing in the mud, their eyes rolling, froth spitting from their jaws, their fetlocks cut to the bone by a butcher’s cleaver or woodsman’s axe. And the city’s tradesmen and porters, covered in blood from head to toe, dragged the armoured Lords through the horses’ gore like carters hauling turnip sacks.
Where in Hell were the Bishop’s infantrymen? I swerved Ashkelon round and back up the mound to look. They had started to advance. But late, far too late. And seeing Lichtenberg and others fleeing the field, and hearing the keening whinnies of the butchered horses and the curses of the unseated, blood-soaked Lords, they faltered, and then broke and ran.
And it was all over. Like that. The work of months, in a few feints and parries.
† † †
Sometimes Victory is not quite as you’d imagined it. And our Victory could not have been more complete, more resounding. But it was an unsightly one that left a sour, metallic taste, like sucking on a tarnished coin.
As soon as the Bishop’s ragged, scattered forces sounded the bugle for retreat, the Hagenburg hounds were let loose on the Killing Ground. Out came beggars, pimps, hawkers and whores and swept the field like starving vultures, pulling armour, weapons, amulets and medallions off the fallen corpses, cutting off chainmail in clinking bundles. I even saw one young carpenter’s boy—he could not have been more than thirteen summers—who, unable to pull off a nobleman’s signet ring, merely reached in his pack, took out a saw, and started carving away at the wrist, cutting off the man’s whole hand.
Turning away I saw, beyond the piles of twitching, groaning horses and noble dead, ranged along a hawthorn hedgerow, hundreds of hostage pages and Lords. Some of the greatest Knights of Alsace were there, stripped to their braies and shirts, their faces bruised and lopsided from the pummelling of cudgels, their wrists and ankles tied in rope and cord.
And it’s here that the Great Haggling began. The Common Men of Hagenburg, who had—let us freely admit it—risked their lowly lives to bring down the Lords and their horses, now demanded a reckoning in hard silver.
“My Lord,” called out a group of porkbutchers to me, “how much will you pay us for this Baron von Finstingen?”
The Baron von Finstingen was, thankfully, already beaten unconscious as this conversation took place, lying bound in the mud, stripped of his priceless armour and wrapped in a horse blanket. Otherwise, can you imagine it, haggling over his ransom price as if he were a coil of sausage?
I looked the covey of butchers straight in the eyes. “I will name you no price, sirs. The Clerk of the Count von Habsburg will be with you presently. It is he who will take charge of the prisoners.”
“We won’t take less than a square mark, My Lord. Any less and we’ll keep our prisoner and make the deal with his people ourselves.”
I shake my head. This must be nipped in the bud, straight away. “There you are mistaken, men. Where will you house the Lord von Finstingen whilst you wait for his ransom price? In your smokehouse alongside your sides of bacon? And how will you deal with the House of Finstingen? Will the Baroness von Finstingen haggle with you porkbutchers as if she’s buying a pound of chops?”
“We can haggle as good as any Lady.”
“Men. Know your Place. These Lords will be taken into our custody and housed in the Chapter House of the Cathedral, as befits their station. Not in your pork shop.”
They stand. And there is mutiny in their avaricious eyes. “But it’s us who captured him.”
“And you will be well compensated. We thank you for your valorous actions on this day. God give you a good evening.”
I wanted to take the Baron von Finstingen myself right there and then. Bundle him on my back and take him to my tent. Clothe him in my spare robes. Treat him with honour. For to see him lying there in the mud, bruised and beaten by sausage-butchers, I could feel no sense of Victory, only of Shame.
And if the defeated Lords are not now treated with respect and distinction, the battle will not end here. It will echo through the years to come, and no honour will redound to my name, but only infamy.
And so I walk through the field of blood. And look upon the prisoners lying in the mud against the hawthorn hedge. And I look into the faces of the Hagenburg victors. Their faces, stained with gore, bear expressions of insolent triumph. For they know what they have done. They have brought about a Levelling. It was they who drew the Mighty down from their proud chargers and levelled them in the mud of Wolfsbergen.
But these Levellers, they’ll all be bought off with money. And that’s how it will end here. With purses of coin pressed into their bloodstained hands.
THE CHRONICLE OF WALTHER VON KOLZECK: PART III
(ANNO 1262. WALTHER VON KOLZECK III)
The convincing victory of the City of Hagenburg at the Battle of Wolfsbergen induced a brief period of euphoria, celebration and confidence amongst Hagenburg’s citizens, yet proved to be but a Chimera, an illusory triumph. Firstly it must be noted that the Bishop and his dependents (his court, the clergy, the tradesmen and professions that served these dependencies) formed such a large part of the Hagenburg economy that their continued absence debilitated the city’s trade, causing increase in want and hardship. Secondly, although the Bishop had been militarily defeated and rudely apprised of the City’s martial might, there existed no instrument or mechanism by which the City might remove von Kolzeck from his throne and seat of power. This could only be achieved by his Death, by the intercession of the Pope himself, or, in some rare and controversial circumstances, by the Holy Roman Emperor. All three of these options seemed vexingly remote: Bishop von Kolzeck, at the age of twenty-four, was still a young man and in the bloom of health, the Pope could not be expected to support the City in its vendetta against one of His own anointed primates, and the Emperor at the time, Richard of Cornwall, an Englishman, was seen as distant and uncomprehending of the political workings of his own Empire, and surely unwilling to embroil himself in a local contro
versy.
Sporadic fighting continued throughout the summer of 1262. The City’s troops, now much reduced into a small band of experienced fighters, used the threat of force to persuade recalcitrant villages and townships to renounce their loyalty to von Kolzeck. When not engaged in this process of policing and enforcement, von Kronthal’s men plagued and harried the Black Forest valleys and the east bank of the Rhine around Prinzbach, the von Kolzecks’ stronghold. Here they often seized the all-valuable consignments of silver issued in armed convoys from the Prinzbach silver mines, thereby forcing a temporary closure of the mine, a severe blow to the von Kolzecks’ finances.
For their part, the knights and troops who remained loyal to the Bishop sallied intermittently forth in increasingly desperate and unsuccessful attempts to reverse the tide of misfortune that had swept upon them. A bold, surprise attack on Hagenburg itself, made in the deluded hope of freeing the ransomed prisoners in the Cathedral Cloister, was a bloody disaster. A bid to retake once-loyal Colmar for the Bishop also ended in ignominious failure. Gradually, von Kolzeck’s allies and supporters returned to their estates, his mercenaries left in hope of more profitable employment in other lands, and any prospects of a change in Walther von Kolzeck’s lamentable fortunes looked remote indeed.
Nevertheless, conditions in Hagenburg were becoming increasingly desperate. And so it was that the Councillors of Hagenburg, led by Niklaus Zorn, wrote a letter to Bishop von Kolzeck couched in respectful and even emollient terms, requesting his return to his seat of power, and a peaceful and productive negotiation of a new City Statute.
The travails of Walther von Kolzeck could, hypothetically, have ended here if he had accepted the City’s offer of peace. But he and his embittered advisors saw the letter not as an offer of compromise but rather as a poisoned chalice, a guileful lure to enter a trap. Even if the idea of “bargaining” with the common ministerial class could be entertained, they believed that von Kolzeck, as a defeated warlord, had no leverage or power in the negotiations, and that the Councillors and Ministers would be able to force his position. In consequence they believed that the only recourse was to form a new army with the aid and support of the Pope, and to defeat the City on the second attempt, on the battlefield.
Had they known and considered the parlous state of the Hagenburg economy and the hardship endured by the merchants and traders of the City, they would have realised they had a strong position in any possible negotiations, but of things such as trade and the exigencies of daily life in Hagenburg they had no experience, knowledge or understanding.
† † †
A Dominican emissary bearing letters of entreaty was dispatched to Italy and the Papal Court. Bishop von Kolzeck implored His Holiness for his aid and assistance in the form of finance from the Papal coffers (to be repaid at interest upon Victory) and, of more vital importance, a Papal Bull exhorting the rulers of adjacent lands, the Bishops of Metz, Basel, Konstanz and Mayenz, the Abbots of the greater abbeys and monasteries, the Noblemen of Hessen, Westphalia, Lothringen and Swabia, to come to von Kolzeck’s aid and join in Holy War against this ungodly, insurrectionary city of upstarts and rebels.
No answer was forthcoming. To Walther von Kolzeck’s misfortune, the Pope who had anointed his appointment to the cathedra, Pope Alexander IV, had passed away the year before. The new incumbent of the Papal Throne, Urban IV, clearly did not regard this Upper Rhineland dispute, dramatic as it was, as high on his list of priorities. Before being elected Pope, Urban IV had been the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and the recent seizure of Latin Constantinople by the Orthodox Nicean Greeks was his primary concern; records from the time attest to his attempt to raise a crusade to recapture the city on the Bosphorus. At this time he was also negotiating with Manfred, illegitimate son of Staufen Emperor Friedrich II, to lead the crusade in exchange for papal recognition of the Staufen as Kings of Sicily; a highly fraught and controversial political gambit.
In this context, it is eminently comprehensible that Pope Urban IV saw the travails of Bishop von Kolzeck as undeserving of his immediate attention. And there is maybe another factor to consider: Urban IV was a commoner, the son of a cobbler of Troyes. It is possible that his sympathies did not automatically lie with the Alsatian nobility, but with the councillors, traders and merchants of Hagenburg.
Whatever the reason, the von Kolzeck camp waited in vain for succour from the Papal Throne. Summer passed, autumn came, and one by one their remaining allies slipped away. Werner von Kolzeck took to drink. Walther von Kolzeck, who only months before had been a bright, energetic youth, vital and confident, always the centre of attention in any situation, became melancholy and withdrawn. Outside their castle walls, Prinzbach had become a ghost of its former self. Work in the mine had almost completely come to a halt as the depredations of Baron von Kronthal’s mercenary bands made it impossible to dispatch the silver out of the Prinzbach valley and to the markets of Hagenburg, Nuremberg and Cologne. Many of the mine workers had left, seeking employment elsewhere. The settlement, once a thriving mining community, declined into lassitude and snowbound silence.
At the beginning of Advent, Walther von Kolzeck fell ill. One of his teeth became rotten and infected and had to be removed. The doctor prescribed lattwerge, a tincture of opium drunk dissolved in wine to remove its bitterness. The infection soon healed, the toothache abated, but Bishop von Kolzeck continued to imbibe ever greater doses of the restorative medicine.
Some say he died at his own hand. Some say he died from surfeit of lattwerge, taken in intoxicated error. But most say he died, simply, of Grief. Grief that all his dreams had been crushed, Grief that he had risen so rapidly, so high, on the Wheel of Fortune, and then been sent, battered and floundering, into the depths of Ignominy.
The last words he has left to posterity are those he spoke only days before his death. May my name be blotted out, may my deeds be forgotten, may, when I die, there remain no trace of my passing.
Even this, his final wish, was unwisely made, and is unlikely to be granted.
† Walther von Kolzeck, Bishop of Hagenburg
(1238–1263)
ANNO
1263
BRUSHWOOD
(ANNO 1263. BARON VOLMAR VON KRONTHAL VIII)
Soft voices, talking in a Lothringian village dialect I can hardly understand. Laughter and the rustle of leaves, crackling of twigs. I look up from my bivouac, my eyes blurred with sleep.
It’s not long after dawn, and they look like beetles, insects. On their backs, strapped with leather ties, huge bundles of brushwood.
They haven’t seen me. Haven’t seen Ashkelon, who stands nearby, his breath steaming in the air. We’re hidden in the copse where I took shelter late last night.
They crawl their laborious way upwards towards the Saargemin road, stooping to pick up sticks and fallen branches as they go. Reaching the road, they untie their huge burdens, sit down and rest. Eat bread, talk. A family of them—mother, father, a daughter, a son.
From my hidden vantage point I watch them as I strike camp, folding the sheep hides I slept on, giving Ashkelon his morning sack of oats and green spelt. They sit cross-legged, passing crusts of bread and a gourd of water between them without ceremony or invitation.
After a short rest, they take up their huge, brushwood burdens again, and, singing a peasant song, a canon in four voices, they walk on down the Saargemin road.
† † †
I waited a while before I visited the prisoners in the Cathedral Cloister. I left time for tempers to calm, for the demon Revenge to loosen its grasp on the hearts of the vanquished. I’d given word to the gaolers to indulge their noble whims, and by the time I came by, they had raised money from the Jews and brought in carpets and goose-down cushions, fine wine and whores. The cloister cells looked more like some Saracen serail than a cold, German gaol.
To sweeten my arrival, I had two tuns of the Bishop’s wine rolled in be
hind me, and that smoothed matters a great deal. Not that we all sat down together, embracing and drinking Brotherhood, but at least none of them tried to murder me.
Habsburg’s Clerk had prepared them all: sign a declaration of loyalty to the City, a renunciation of alliance to von Kolzeck and his dwindling band of supporters, pay the ransom and then they’re free men. They didn’t like it much, but after a while they could see which way the wind was blowing. A Ransom is nothing to sing about, but tighten your belt and collect your rents from your lands, pray for fine harvests and good prices for your meat, wheat and wine, and in two or three years you’ll be back in the saddle. It’s taking noblemen’s land that leads to feuds and endless trouble, and we’re not touching their property, just the weight of their purse. It’ll make them bitter for a while, maybe, but not hateful for generations.
The only landowners we’re looking to disown are the von Kolzecks themselves. I want Prinzbach and the mines. And the way it’s going for them, with all their “loyal subjects” running from them like they’ve contracted leprosy, old, heirless Werner von Kolzeck will have to concede it soon.
Chivalry? That’s what the captured Knights were carping about when I visited them in their whorehouse prison. “Where was the Chivalry in cutting down our steeds like common highwaymen? Where was the Honour and Glory in that, My Lord Baron?” And I, shamefaced Victor with laurels of ransomed silver, laughed and said, “Well, whatever it was, it worked, didn’t it?”