Agneta Willeken

Agneta Willeken (* around 1497 in Hamburg , † before 1562 in Hamburg) was the lover of Lübeck's city governor Marx Meyer and through him influenced Lübeck's politics during the count's feud .

Life

Agneta Willeken was the daughter of the wealthy Hamburg brewer Peter Radkens and the wife of the Icelandic driver Hans Willeken (or Wilken). When her husband had to leave the city financially ruined in 1527 (he died in Lübeck in 1535), she gave her daughters to her sister for upbringing and began a relationship with the blacksmith Marx Meyer. He probably owes his military career to her ambition. He even gave her the knight's chain that Henry VIII had given him. Although she did not follow him to Lübeck , she influenced him and, through him, the political decisions of the Lübeck mayor Jürgen Wullenwever . Witnesses in the trial mentioned below blame her, at least indirectly, for Lübeck's war against Holstein .

Although Marx Meyer married Elsabe Lunte in 1533, the widow of the mayor Gottschalck Lunte, who died shortly before, and daughter of the patrician Hermann von Wickede , Agneta remained loyal to him. When the counts feud broke out in 1534, she came to her lover's house in Trittau Castle , which had been taken from Kay von Rantzau, and made ample use of the clothes and jewelry that Frau von Rantzau had left behind. From then on she behaved like a princess.

However, after Marx Meyer had to capitulate at the Varberg Fortress in May 1536 and was executed shortly afterwards, she was met with contempt in Hamburg. In particular, the fact that in a letter she sent to Marx Meyer, who was besieged in Varberg in August 1535, she described herself as the "right main church" next to the "Capellen", his Lübeck wife and his numerous lovers, brought her a lot of ridicule because the letter was intercepted by the Danish general Johann Rantzau . This led him to the King Christian III. further, who had it reproduced and published. Since only one of these copies has survived, but not the original letter from Agneta Willeken, one can only speculate to what extent the letter was supplemented with defamatory passages. Agneta Willeken tried to maintain a relationship with the England driver, councilor and senior citizen Joachim Wullenwever, the brother of the now overthrown mayor of Lübeck. This relationship encouraged the suspicion - in addition to the defense of his brother, who had meanwhile been imprisoned in Rotenburg (Wümme) - of Joachim Wullenwever's betrayal of his hometown and led to his exclusion from the council in 1536. He died impoverished in Malmö in 1558 .

In addition to the letter intercepted by the Danes, in which she recommended to her lover that the Varberg fortress be given over to the English king, the detailed files of a multi-year trial at the Imperial Court of Justice in Speyer from 1548 onwards have been preserved. The widow Agneta Willeken sued the mayor and the city council of Hamburg for insult. Ten years earlier, their teenage daughters Anna and Margareta, who until then had been brought up in the Uetersen monastery , had a party under the supervision of two aunts, which the city held in honor of a visit by King Christian III. from Denmark gave, watched. Allegedly, without giving a reason, they were sent away by a city servant at the behest of Melchior Rantzau . In addition, according to the dress code for bourgeois daughters , they had been given their jewelry - probably from the holdings of the Trittau Rantzaus - and taken away. This shame would have deprived both the girls and the plaintiff herself of good marriage opportunities (both were married at the time of the lawsuit (!)). She therefore demanded 24,000 guilders in compensation, which was roughly what the city earned in one year. The fact that she only went to court after such a long time was due to the fact that she had previously tried unsuccessfully from Schwerin to gain satisfaction with the help of Hans Kopeke and even Duke Albrechts of Mecklenburg . Hans Kopeke, who had married Agneta Willeken's older daughter, had declared the feud in Hamburg , but had been executed as a robber after several years of activity. The trial did not end until 1583, when the city was sentenced to 1,000 guilders in compensation for illegally insulting the two girls. The money was shared between the descendants of the daughters, who have since died.

literature

• Heinrich Reincke : Agneta Willeken. A life picture from Wullenwever's days , Pentecost papers of the Hanseatic History Association 1928
• Edith Ennen: Women in the Middle Ages , CH Beck, 1999; Pp. 154-156