Faustus: The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician

by Leo Ruickbie

  As a boy Faustus would have heard stories of the many uprisings, and perhaps seen mutilated exiles begging for bread. As a young man he may have seen it first hand during the ‘Poor Conrad’ uprising. Since then the rebellion had smouldered for thirty years, flaring up periodically in Speyer, in the Breisgau near Stuttgart, in the Upper Rhine Valley, until the final reckoning in the bloody battles of 1524–6.

  In Germany, a country of only ten or eleven million, roughly one person in thirty-three, according to the highest estimates, was marching under the Bundschuh. Contemporary estimates of their numbers varied wildly of course. When Archduke Ferdinand wrote to his older brother the Emperor about the rebels, he numbered them at 300,000, although Mario Sanutos only recorded a figure of 200,000 in his diaries and another source suggested 100,000. Modern estimates based on incomplete figures give a total of 151,500 accounted for and another 30,000 not unlikely.9

  The trouble began in June 1524 during the harvest in the county of Stühlingen, south of the Black Forest and far beyond Faustus’s known sphere of action at this time. Folklore attributes this to the whim of a Countess who had her peasants collect snails instead of bringing in the harvest. Enraged by this latest abuse of noble privileges, over a thousand peasants raised a banner of war and elected the Landsknecht Hans Müller von Bulgenbach to lead them; the rebellion spread.

  Ferdinand mobilised the Swabian League, but circumstances forced them into negotiating with the rebels. The bulk of its fighting force was earmarked for Charles V’s campaign in Italy and many of the remaining Landsknechte had gone over to the other side. The League tried to buy time with sham negotiations as its agents worked to undermine the movement, offering double pay to those who agreed to fight in Italy. Other towns seeing the rebels marching towards their gates set up special courts to hear their grievances, but again, all they wanted to do was stall for time. As summer turned to winter, the tactic worked and the icy wind blew many of the discontented back to their firesides.

  The deposed Duke Ulrich now saw his chance to retake his forfeited lands in Württemberg. Adopting the ridiculous title of ‘Ulrich the Peasant’ and waiving aside his previous oppression of the peasantry, Ulrich presented himself as a new man, a friend to the lower orders and a champion of their cause. Over the winter he raised a mercenary army, bolstered by a peasant band under von Bulgenbach, and by late February 1525 he was marching on Stuttgart.

  Ulrich stood more than a fighting chance, but his attempt to reclaim his Duchy was suddenly cut short. Following the French defeat in Italy, the Swiss mercenaries in his service were recalled and the remaining peasant militias were unable to stand against the professional soldiers of the Swabian League. After only a few heady weeks he was again a fugitive. This setback did not bring peace. Discontent was still waving her banner high.

  The League continued trying to buy more time and had involved Ulrich Schmid and his 10,000 strong Baltringen Band in negotiations. Believing that they now had a chance to be heard, the Band compiled a massive list of over three hundred grievances. At the beginning of March, Sebastian Lotzer put these complaints more succinctly in the famous Twelve Articles. They covered such things as the appointment of pastors, the grain tithe due to the Church, serfdom, the hunting of game, wood-cutting, excessive services, the relationship between lord and peasant, ruinous rents, the multiplication of new laws, the erosion of commons and the death tax. The document was couched in pious terms, giving the political demands a religious character and in the process making them twice as strongly felt. Within a short space of time 25,000 copies were in circulation. In all these lists and articles the core demand was simple: the abolition of serfdom. This was nothing less than the overthrow of the establishment.

  Further peasant bands sprang up in March and April from the shores of Lake Constance to the walls of Würzburg. Their numbers swelled anew with Landsknechte returning from the Italian campaign. There were many victories against only a few setbacks, morale was high, but by now the League was ready.

  The dull thud of thousands of marching feet, the discordant rattle of arms and the whinnying of horses carried on the wind. In the distance a banner could be seen flying above a forest of Landsknechte pikes. It bore three black lions on a field of gold. The rebels grew uneasy as they recognised the armorial insignia of Georg III, Truchsess von Waldburg (1488–1531), leader of the Swabian League army. He had seen off the truculent Duke Ulrich at Stuttgart and was now intent on smashing the peasants.

  Known as Bauernjörg (‘peasant George’), Truchsess von Waldburg had also been conducting sham negotiations with the peasants to enable him to deploy his forces. Spring flowers were crushed under the feet of fighting men and the bodies of the dead as Truchsess opened his campaign with a series of skirmishes against the Baltringen Band before moving against the Leipheim Band. On 4 April 1525 the first decisive battle of the Peasants’ War was fought and the peasants lost.

  Truchsess quickly followed up with further victories, but the war was far from over. The peasants continued to capture cities and castles, and more joined their numbers. As many as a thousand castles and religious buildings were destroyed in 1525 alone. Heilbronn, Stuttgart and Erfurt and other major towns fell into their hands. Although Truchsess had shown that he could more than match the rebels in the field, there was widespread panic amongst those who did not share their cause. Luther, for one, became hysterical in his denunciations of them. Returning to Wittenberg to preach, the rebels drowned him out with a tumultuous peel of bells and he was pelted with copies of the Twelve Articles. Luther expected that they would win and feared for his own safety. He derided the revolutionaries with his usual recourse to Satan and called upon the nobles to slaughter them mercilessly.10

  The momentum of the uprising was finally checked in a rapid series of bloody battles throughout May and into June 1525. Some groups still held out and there were further uprisings, but decimated and leaderless, the peasants’ dream of a better world had been drowned in the blood of their dead.

  Although numerically superior to the League, the rebel bands were locally deployed and scattered over a wide area. Lack of a unified command and bickering between radical and liberal factions internally weakened the rebels who were already disadvantaged by their relative lack of soldiering experience, in spite of the Landsknechte in their ranks. Against them the League deployed duplicity and might backed by Fugger and Welser money, and carried out by the ruthless Truchsess and other seasoned campaigners such as Georg von Frundsberg. The peasants’ willingness to negotiate constantly saw them outwitted and their readiness to meet superior forces in the field, whilst a credit to their bravery, was a tactical mistake.

  The conjunction of the planets may not have augured a biblical flood, but to the astrologer with hindsight they had unleashed a deluge of blood and tears: ‘A land full of murder and bloodshed’ in Luther’s words.11 As many as 100,000 are thought to have perished and not all of them died on the field of battle. There was no Geneva Convention in the sixteenth century. Atrocity was the norm. Captives were publicly burnt alive, staked to the ground, beheaded, disembowelled or hoisted on wheels. The cry of freedom ended in the scream of summary justice. Crushed and ground firmly back into the dirt, the peasants would continue to bear the heavy yoke of serfdom for another two hundred years.

  Given what we know of Faustus it is difficult to assess where his sympathies would have lain. Association with the rebels would have damaged his career and perhaps it did. The historical record charts a more troubled course after the events of 1524–1526. Whilst Faustus seemed to hold the commonality in awe, his sometimes high brow pitch was also aimed at the intellectual community and those who sought its services. Before the uprising he had sought out noble patrons or clients like von Sickingen and the Bishop of Bamberg, and later claims would reveal, if not a noble lineage, then at least noble aspirations. Against this we have seen that some nobles did take up the commoners’ cause and his earlier association with the rebellious von Sickingen may
have radicalised his politics. It was easy for the educated to despise the peasants for their rudeness and illiteracy, and social justice was not the concern of sixteenth-century students and scholars. If he played a part it was surely as an astrologer divining the outcome rather than as a partisan, but later claims would reveal that he did involve himself in the business of war. If it is unlikely that he joined the revolution, he certainly could not have avoided it – the countryside was a charnel house – but by 1525, according to the legend, Faustus was many miles away.

  Auerbach’s Cellar

  Made famous by Goethe and thus irrevocably attached to the name of Faustus is the incident at Auerbach’s Cellar in Leipzig. Today two bronze statues flank the entrance to the cellar, marking a moment in the building’s history when it almost vanished forever. A rich suitcase manufacturer called Anton Mädler bought Auerbach’s Hof in 1911, intending to demolish it and build a new exhibition pavilion in its place. The vehemence of the local reaction to his plans caused him to reconsider and instead of the wrecking ball he brought in art. The sculptor Mathieu Molitor was commissioned to embellish the entrance and in 1913 his Faust and Mephistopheles and The Enchanted Students were unveiled. The projecting left foot of Faustus in the Faust and Mephistopheles group has been buffed to shining gold by the hands of countless people rubbing it for good luck as they passed. In 1999 two smaller sculptures by Bernd Göbel were completed showing Faust and Margaret and Mephistopheles and Marthe after Goethe. Both women are naked and apparently trying to fend off the advances of the diabolical duo. Even this crowd of brazen characters fails to reveal the truth of Faustus’s visit to Auerbach’s Cellar.

  Goethe contrived a riotous scene at Auerbach’s Cellar, drawing on the Erfurt legend of tapping wine from the table and the Erfurt/Boxberg tale of attempted nose cutting. But he also included a story we have not found elsewhere, extricating his hero from a dangerous situation on the back of a barrel.

  A story made famous by the incomparable Goethe and immortalised in bronze seems unshakable, but did it really take place? Faustus’s contemporaries made no references to him being in Leipzig. The story appeared for the first time in a 1588 edition of Spies’s 1587 Historia and Auerbach’s Cellar was not mentioned by name. However, on the walls of the Cellar are two murals depicting the legendary event and bearing the date 1525, and there is a mention in the seventeenth-century Leipzig Chronicle, a late source admittedly, placing Faustus there for that year.

  It is no surprise to find Faustus in a wine cellar. We often meet Faustus in the inn or tavern, especially in the Faustbooks where he seems to be almost constantly carousing in the company of riotous students. There have been some who have taken this report at face value and used it as yet another mark against Faustus’s name. However, whilst the stories are clearly exaggerated even if true, the Germans as a nation were, by the common report of many, excessive drinkers. P.F. was rather amusing on this point, calling Faustus ‘the God Bacchus’ before describing how he threw a feast ‘after the manner of Germany, where it is counted no feast except all the bidden guests be drunk.’12 It was even something acknowledged by some Germans themselves, such as Matthäus Friedrich in 1522: ‘Germany is and always has been plagued, more than all other countries, by the devil that drives people to drink.’13

  But the censorious tone of both Friedrich and P.F. is that of the religious moraliser – we must not forget that P.F.’s version of the Faustus story is a religiously motivated tract and Friedrich may have studied under Luther at Wittenberg. P.F. is also talking about ‘foreigners’ and hence inclined to exaggerate through prejudice. Yet we should not underestimate the role alcohol played in Faustus’s lifetime. The culture of drinking in early sixteenth-century Germany was at the heart of society. The drinking establishment was an institution that rivalled the church in its importance. Men met here to conduct business, concluding deals with a traditional contract toast, and define their social roles.14

  Tavern and inn also provided additional avenues of power beyond the official and tightly controlled venues of guildhall and town council. As a popular, secular powerbase it is natural that we should find someone like Faustus seeking business here. Paracelsus, for example, broadcast his religious views in the inns and taverns and faced similar accusations of drunkenness, pointedly when his views did not accord with those of the authorities. What becomes for later writers a sign of Faustus’s delinquency and charlatanry was for Faustus the obvious sphere in which to pursue his career. There were other stories of Faustus in inns. On one occasion he silences a roomful of noisy peasants,15 but it was the barrel-riding in Auerbach’s Cellar that was to prove the more enduring tale. But why in Leipzig?

  Even then Leipzig was an old university town. The Alma mater Lipsiensis, officially endorsed by Pope Alexander V, opened its doors on 2 December 1409. Simon Pistoris the Elder (1453–1523), doctor and professor of medicine at the university, was also a proponent of the use of astrology in medicine. Perhaps more to the point, Pistoris’s rival in Nuremberg at that time, the former astrologer Polich von Mellerstadt remarked in 1510 or earlier, with more than a hint of irritation, that ‘because astrological judgements are sold at higher prices in Leipzig than in Nuremberg, astrologers are esteemed more highly there than here.’16 A wandering scholar like Faustus would have found his way naturally to the doors of this august institution with its astrological tradition and higher prices. And where there is a university there are students, and where there are students there is drinking, and so we return full circle to the cellar.

  The town was bustling when Faustus arrived, if he did. Famous for its fairs since the twelfth century, Leipzig was a flourishing city in the sixteenth century. The earliest fairs had been held by long tradition over the Easter period and on the Feast of St Michael (29 September), but there was also a New Year fair established in 1458. Since 1507 they were officially recognised as imperial fairs (Reichsmessen). Drawn by learning, the fair or the good fortunes of the Lords of Rochlitz, industrious at their nearby castle, the town was filled with scholars, merchants and artisans. Many of them would have found their way to a heterogeneous group of buildings by the market square owned by a certain Dr Heinrich Stromer from Auerbach (c.1478–1542). Here a special passageway was given over to the fair where, according to the Leipzig Chronicle, ‘a great variety of goods is sold and much money invested and spent’.17

  Dr Stromer, or Auerbach as he is commonly called, was a doctor of philosophy and medicine, dean of the medical college, a member of the town council, and later the personal physician to Elector Friedrich III of Saxony. The buildings that have become known as Auerbach’s Court began life slowly and in piecemeal fashion. Auerbach bought the main building in 1519 from the heirs of town councillor Hanns Hommelshain. This substantial four-storey half-timbered dwelling probably dated to 1438, when the judge Dr Nicolaus Schulthess was its owner. Over the next few years he bought up several neighbouring buildings and in 1530 began building work that would take another eight years to complete. When it was finished it comprised a hundred vaults for use by merchants during the fair, additional stalls within the vaults, two galleries, ‘pleasant rooms, lounges and lodgings’, and a fine stable for the merchants’ horses. In 1525, the time of Faustus’s supposed visit, Auerbach had but recently opened his new wine cellar.18

  The Leipzig Chronicle records that ‘some people say that the famous Dr Faustus stayed with him [Auerbach] when he was in Leipzig’, although this is contested.19 Whether Faustus stayed with the owner or not, the legendary deeds enacted here continue to grace its walls. Two paintings bear the date 1525, but they were not painted then, and a cask preserved in the cellar is believed to have been that very same ridden by Faustus. However, if Auerbach ever met Faustus, he chose not to commemorate the fact.

  In the Faustbook we find Faustus sampling the wines of the Rhineland, admiring those of Budapest in Hungary, stealing all the beer and wine from an innkeeper in Ravensburg, and ransacking the wine cellars of the Dukes of Saxony and
Bavaria and the Bishop of Salzburg, but never touches so much as a drop in Leipzig. During his magical world tour he calls into Leipzig where he marvels at a ‘great vessel’ in the castle, but this was not the property of Auerbach.20

  In the course of the Faustbook, Mephistopheles outfitted Faustus and his assistant with only the finest fashions, notably calling in Leipzig to collect some pieces, suggesting that the city was also known for the sumptuous stock of its mercers. Faustus was also said to have a friend in the town, a certain ‘Jove Victori’, a physician by profession and formerly a fellow student at Wittenberg, to whom he wrote about cosmology and his world tour. While the first reference places Faustus in Leipzig – at least according to the sixteenth-century legend – neither of these references are directly concerned with marvellous cask-riding exploits.21

  Widmann notably added a chapter – ‘Dr Faustus gives the students in Leipzig a cask of wine as a present’ – in his retelling of the legend in 1599. Pfitzer revised Widmann, changing the cast a little and reducing the size of the cask, and republished the tale in 1674. Another version appeared in 1728 and a folk legend was recorded in 1839 that repeated the same course of events. A regular patron of the cellar whilst a student in Leipzig, Goethe found a copy of the tale, according to one tradition, chained to the wall and with it the inspiration for his famous scene.22