Germania

by Simon Winder

  A semi-comic element of bad luck plagued German engagement with the crusades. The First Crusade had been successful, through sheer religious fervour, military shock tactics and great good luck (all histories of the crusade are a heated exchange about how to portion out these three elements), taking Antioch and Jerusalem from the Muslims in a series of astounding bloodbaths. There is an argument that this was in fact a disaster for Europe (as well as for Islam) and that if only the First Crusade had been roundly crushed then an awful lot of time and trouble over many subsequent generations would have been saved. The later history of the crusades is a farce of misdirected effort, semi-heroic forlorn hopes, loopy visions and total failure. The Islamic world, as soon as it had adjusted to the shock of the arrival of hordes of sweating Northern Europeans, had the resources to push them back to a coastal strip and stymie all attempts to carve out something worthwhile. Louis IX of France wandering about in a swamp in the Nile Delta, carried in a litter by four strong men with a special hole cut in the seat to allow his dysentery to freely and immediately express itself, sadly rather sums up the crusades. The Emperor Conrad III was crucial to the hopeless Second Crusade, which settled down to take Damascus, found that even this one city was far too strong for it, and petered out.

  Friedrich I Barbarossa himself was meant to be one of the super-crusade bringing together Friedrich, Richard the Lionheart and Philip Augustus: the Emperor of Germany, the King of England/ Duke of Normandy and the King of France in a single, overwhelming commitment to the Holy Land in response to earlier fiascos. In 1188, in an emotional ceremony in Mainz Cathedral, the elderly Friedrich pledged himself and his followers to recover the Holy Land. Unfortunately, Friedrich’s formidable army, having cut its way through the Danube countries, met disaster when Friedrich either had a heart attack or drowned falling from his horse while crossing a Turkish river, leaving his army to be hacked to bits. The legend grew that Friedrich, asleep in a mountain cave, would awake at Germany’s greatest hour of need – a legend unfortunately based on a sixteenth-century misprint, typesetting incompetence being as old as printing itself. The legend had in fact been first attached not to Friedrich I but to his grandson Friedrich II, the last of the truly extraordinary medieval Emperors, the exuberant, polyglot ‘Wonder of the World’. By the time historians discovered this mistake it was all far too late and countless statues, paintings and frescoes – including a particularly hilarious one in the Goslar palace with Friedrich awakened with joy at German unification – feature the wrong man.

  Expeditions continued to go to the Holy Land and – in the delusive belief that this might somehow be easier – to Egypt, despite its only glancing involvement with the life work of Jesus. The crusaders lost their last mainland toehold in 1291, long after any real hope or vision remained. One tiny chink of light had been provided when the Mongols crashed into modern-day Iraq in 1258 and an excited group of emissaries went to see the Great Khan in the hope of a Christian–Mongol alliance against Islam. As we will see, this was a sadly delusive initiative.

  Before moving on, I would need to have a heart of stone not to mention the Count of Gleichen. This blameless Thuringian crusader chose to portray himself on his magnificent funerary slab in Erfurt Cathedral flanked by both his wife and his mother. At some hard-to-pin-down point this turned into the idea that the count, Ernst III, had in fact been bigamous. This in turn became a story of how in the Holy Land he had been enslaved by the Saracens but then rescued by a beautiful Turkish maiden, whom he married and brought back to his Thuringian Schloss. After working through a few issues with the countess, who had been faithfully waiting for years, the count was rescued by the Pope, who gave him a special dispensation to be married to them both.

  The story has several glaring weak points but of course the subtext (or just text) of three-in-a-bed, wimples, chainmail and harem-style inventiveness lends it permanent value. A musical based on the story which is currently touring Thuringia seems unlikely to take full advantage of the more lurid possibilities available to it. Erfurt is a very beautiful town but not a place where anything much has ever happened. In front of its spectacular main churches there is a magnificent open square (created by accident when loads of houses burnt down) where the Emperor Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I met. Otherwise it has always been absolutely somnolent. This provided a challenge for the usual late-nineteenth-century artist called in to paint the usual frescoes for the staircases of the Bismarck-era neo-Gothic city hall. He resolved it by only featuring made-up events: so he painted a couple of scenes from Tannhäuser, which was supposed to happen fairly nearby, and an excellent, if fictional, moment from the Faust legend where some Erfurter students are astonished by the doctor conjuring up the giant Polyphemus. The centrepiece, however, is the lucky Count of Gleichen, shown ecstatically kneeling at an altar in rapt and rather weedy contemplation of God on his safe homecoming. Clearly the whole situation was too much for the artist, Eduard Kämpffer, who recklessly threw in an extra twist by painting the two wives, kneeling on either side of praying Ernst, eyeing each other with a certain heat. It must be enjoyable to live in Erfurt and constantly find excuses to run into the city hall to pay parking fines, enquire about loft-insulation grants and so on just to get another reminder of the pious count’s fun home life.

  Thrust to the east

  Despite having a strongly farcical element, the crusades and the idea of the crusades became quickly grafted onto existing German ideas about the shifting German–pagan frontier, much as it proved a fruitful idea in Spain for the next four centuries. German crusaders still went to the Holy Land and they supported an important military order there, the Teutonic Knights, but the latter’s great effort and lasting, highly contentious contribution to Germany was not in the Near East, but in Central Europe itself.

  The very name ‘Teutonic Knights’ immediately taps into a rich pageant of pre-moulded images – of some Grand Master with a huge red beard, in full armour, enjoying some hapless novice, taking great slurps of wine from a bejewelled goblet between profane curses, pausing only to be confessed by a pliant priest. This sense of the Teutonic Knights as in some unique way completely out of control, of course, comes in part from the experience of the twentieth century – the use of their cross on German military equipment, the idea of ‘Prussianism’ as something at the heart of the German fighting ethos and a general feeling that the Knights prefigured Wilhelmine and Nazi soldiers in some rather foggy way. The Knights’ black legend is at the heart of Eisenstein’s anti-German medieval movie epic Alexander Nevsky, where to Prokofiev’s unbeatable music the Knights, in deathlessly spooky costumes (a bishop smiling approval all the while), toss Russian babies on the fire.

  I have no particular brief to restore the Knights’ reputation; my only thought is that their cult of violence does not seem to have split off much from the general standards of the entire period. Their traces are creepy – the vast brick fortresses of the Baltic and the indefinably sinister atmosphere of their heraldic shields, dotting churches from Marburg to Riga. Part of their horror is attached to the name itself, which sounds fiendish but is really just a romantic translation of the perfectly boring Deutscher Orden, ‘German Order’. Over centuries they promoted German rule, albeit at a time when the Empire as a coherent entity had collapsed and when the Knights ruled their territories in practice as independent princes. They completed the conquest of much of the north-east – the territories that became East Prussia and the Baltic states. They smashed up the surviving, unaligned tribes which separated the Empire from the formidable and extensive Christian Poland and pagan Lithuania, thereby creating one of the defining relationships that dogged Europe for centuries.

  All the difficult preoccupations with the Teutonic Knights come together in the Hessian town of Marburg – a place of almost ridiculous beauty, with the upper town like a Hollywood set for The Student Prince. After the death of the austere, self-damaging young widow Elisabeth of Hungary in 1231, the Knights were given the task by the
Emperor Friedrich II of setting up a shrine to honour her name in Marburg. Elisabeth’s example of selfless work with the poor and sick left a profound impression on her contemporaries, particularly given that she was only twenty-four when she died of penitential exhaustion. The launching of the cult by Friedrich II himself in a ceremony of solemn hysteria, personally laying a golden crown on her corpse’s head, was one of the highlights of his reign. Pilgrimage to her tomb flourished and the town grew up around the beautiful early Gothic church the Knights built for her. Remarkably, at the Reformation, Marburg’s rulers decided not to dismantle the fittings of the pilgrimage church, although the pilgrims themselves were sent packing. So, through this striking piece of semi-humanism, we still have an intact church with many of the lovely gifts of statues and altars as well as Elisabeth’s gold relic casket. The Knights’ headquarters are still scattered around this church and are now mostly university buildings, with the odd appealingly stereotypical creepy turret. One of the many striking aspects of Marburg is the row upon row of grand masters’ funeral shields, complex and eldritch in the German manner, as well as the tombs of the Dukes of Hesse. These cold rows of stone men are in themselves a great assembly of medieval art, although so regularly spaced as to have the air of a hospital, albeit one not following ‘best practice’ as everyone is both in insanitary full armour and dead. More surprising is the presence of the tomb of Paul von Hindenburg – the warlord of 1914–18, the quintessential Prussian, the disastrous, cynical, dim President of the German Republic who reluctantly handed power over to Hitler and then died.

  Hindenburg became a German national hero when he defeated an invading Russian army in 1914 at the Battle of Tannenberg, so called because it mirrored the devastating defeat suffered by the Teutonic Knights when fighting the Polish-Lithuanians in 1410 and which ended further eastward German expansion. An immense monument to the 1914 battle was set up and Hindenburg and his wife were buried there in a Wagner-inspired, pseudo-medieval Nazi set-piece, explicitly linking both battles of Tannenberg, the Teutonic Knights and the Third Reich, in that queasy love-death way which any other regime would have considered comic. With the Soviet advance in 1944 the Tannenberg monument was blown up by the SS to avoid its being defiled and the Hindenburgs were hustled westward for the same reason. Indeed in these months a motley collection of corpses were on the move, including many of the principal Hohenzollerns, whose successors had so rapidly mishandled their legacy. Friedrich Wilhelm I, Frederick the Great and Hindenburg all wound up in Marburg, after reluctant agreement from its American administrator. The Prussian kings went home once the coast was clear after 1989, but Hindenburg, in an unlit alcove tucked behind the main doors, seems set to stay for ever – the East Elbian Germany he came to personify is now forever part of Poland, no Germans remain there and the Battle of Tannenberg will never be celebrated by anyone again. So it is appropriate in an icy, strange way that the perfect product of the Teutonic Knights’ carving out of German lands in the east should end up under a big plain slab surrounded by the crests of the grand masters of the order, hundreds of miles from home and with all of his and the Knights’ visions finally erased.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Walled towns » Other superiority complexes »

  A brief note on political structures » German tribes »

  Famine and plague » Where a million diamonds shine

  Walled towns

  The modern German landscape holds innumerable traces of the Middle Ages, however frequently patched up or picturesquely re-imagined. The best vantage point from which to see this landscape, in places such as the Stauferland or Mosel Valley, is from the unmedieval comfort of a train, where these rich, complex worlds of agricultural patchwork, fortified houses, parish churches and small castles drift by the window in a sort of pageant of semi-fraudulent medievalness. In Germany this process is much helped by chaotic political and economic history – because whole regions have in turn come to greatness and then waned completely, often being left behind in a pickled, vegetative state with their town walls intact or with just too little economic vim to be bothered even to knock down their last watch-towers or fill in a defensive ditch. These military and religious fragments are so evocative, even if it is not always clear of what.

  A fine example lies on the picturesque mayfly-dotted River Kocher south-east of Schwäbisch Hall. Wandering through this characteristic, clottedly rich Swabian landscape, there suddenly comes into view an impressive hill topped by a magical fantasy of what a medieval stronghold should look like: the monstrous bulk of Gross Comburg, stuck like an inverted vacuum cup to its hilltop, a perfect set of walls sheltering an ideal towered church and ancient administrative buildings. Founded as a monastery for aristocrats in the eleventh century by the crippled contemplative Duke Burkhard II, Comburg shows how the critical factor in survival and success lay in securing a suitable hill-top – a factor as crucial for Bamberg as for Prague or Salzburg (or indeed Durham or Assisi or a thousand other examples). It is as though medieval towns can be sorted into two kinds – those on hills and those on rivers (with hybrids of the two such as Meissen or Prague being just right). I found myself so obsessed with Gross Comburg when staying in the area that I would find quite spurious reasons for going back down the river for one more look, or crane my neck from the train in a frantic attempt to get another fix. It is an odd comment on how little we really know about the Middle Ages that the loveliest building in the complex, a squat octagonal Romanesque wonderwork, has left no trace of its purpose – a special chapel, a reliquary, a library? It is fair to say that this perfect building over which tremendous care and thought must have been lavished will always remain completely mysterious.

  Town walls were often massively expanded and strengthened, right down to the mid-nineteenth century. Walls defined German towns, giving protection, but also sifting who belonged and who did not. These walls were always problematic as they required so many troops to defend them. In a world in which there were simply not that many people and most were busy shoeing horses, pickling cabbage or making clothes, the headache of armed men, either as mercenaries or as town units put together only by reducing the numbers of blacksmiths and so on, was never resolved. The Middle Ages (and indeed much of the entire period up to the seventeenth century) was a time in which individual urban settlements were responsible for their own fates. Generations might go by with no danger of any kind, but then a war would break out and those towns which had failed to maintain and elaborate their walls or who had failed to keep cutting-edge equipment in the arsenal were doomed to disaster.

  Most town walls were taken down – most spectacularly in Vienna with the huge urban development of the Ring or more usually as in towns such as Trier or Münster where, with a much weaker economic heartbeat, they could only manage to turn them into leafy walks. But where a town was pretty much failing completely, such as Mühlhausen, the walls remain and it is still possible to wander the battlements from turret to turret. In times of anxiety, these walls would have been reinforced by ditches, spikes, water barriers and outlying redoubts. In the face of a serious threat of siege all the houses and trees in the zone outside the walls would have been destroyed and the rubble and timber brought inside. But all this activity became snared in the same problem – how to man all these features, even with a population swollen by the terrified inhabitants of the surrounding countryside flocking in to eat up all the reserve food supplies. And how long could you hold out until a relieving army chased off the marauder? There must have been numerous occasions, at least until the Thirty Years War, where city fathers must have had some pretty fingernail-gnawing conclaves. With rival Emperors, for example, or a truculent local duke, issues of allegiance were insuperably hard. If the job of the city fathers, huddled in their rather elaborate town hall, was to protect their own property and that of their fellow citizens, would this be best achieved by simply surrendering and getting good terms? Or would this result a year later in the Emperor, say, arriving in the to
wn and having all the city fathers pulled to bits with red-hot tongs for treason in front of that self-same rather elaborate town hall? Would closing the gates and initiating a siege result in everyone being half starved and then massacred anyway or would it be seen as the heroic act which turned the tide against an, as it turned out, evanescent threat? When religious issues lumbered into view in the sixteenth century the problems became even worse, if possible. Was it better to go down fighting for the faith in an era where occasional exemplary slaughter was the order of the day, or could an allied army packed with bishops and incense be just over the horizon? Standing on one of the towers of Mühlhausen or up in the battlements of Gross Comburg, albeit buoyed by holding a bottle of Sprite, it is easy to feel the loneliness and gloom of the town watch.

  The principal pooled efforts of towns were in building and maintaining their churches and their walls. The churches were a key defensive element – in the race with ill-intentioned horsemen the best response was the conquest of space brought about by watch-men high in the tower and the conquest of time created by church bells, which could sound alarms that might be heard fifteen miles away. Wittenberg and a handful of other towns still have their military platforms set dizzyingly high in their towers, their watchers presumably always teetering on the verge of either boredom or madness.

  The walls were meant as much to keep the townspeople in as keep enemies out. A curfew would be called each evening and the gates all locked – only specific individuals had the right to reside within the walls at all, so guarding the walls did not merely have to do with external threats. But it must have been a grim life – particularly that of the solitary sentry whose job it was probably to be killed, but to make enough noise in the process to alert his friends. The dullness and threat is perfectly imagined in the guards at the beginning of Hamlet, who at least had the lucky shot of seeing something interesting, or in Dino Buzzati’s 1930s novel The Tartar Steppe where the main character spends the whole story in the pointless exercise of sentry duties in an ever more thinly manned fortress, only to be lying in led, decrepit and sick as, at last, on the distant horizon a monstrous cloud of dust heralds the arrival of the long-promised invaders.