Flegler War

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The Flegler War , also known as the Flegler War , was a peasant uprising and a warlike conflict between warring nobles in the Harz region from 1412 to 1415, a forerunner of the great German Peasants War .

root cause

The basic cause was the increasing disenfranchisement of the peasants. The flailers - so called, either because they were mostly armed with flails or because a flail was their badge - were farmers, reapers , threshers , woodcutters , day laborers and other rural folk and demanded a fairer distribution of goods and the abolition of taxes and labor . They were then instrumentalized by feuding nobles and harnessed for their purposes. Frederick V von Heldrungen made himself their leader through promises of unconstrained freedom and good booty, and several other nobility also joined the league. A total of up to 14,000 men are said to have participated in the uprising.

course

An important trigger of the uprising was the behavior of Count Günther XXX. from Schwarzburg -Blankenburg. His daughter Anna († 1431) had married Landgrave Friedrich the Simple-Minded of Thuringia in 1407 , and Günther von Schwarzburg then began to act increasingly arbitrarily on behalf of the Landgrave, but for his own benefit. This led to growing dissatisfaction among the rural population as well as with Landgrave Friedrich's cousins, the Margraves of Meißen and Landgraves of Thuringia, Friedrich the Arguable and Wilhelm II the Rich . Their admonitions to Friedrich were fruitless, probably because they got stuck with Count Günther, and Günther also ignored her request, which was associated with the threat of violence, to resign his presumptuous guardianship over Landgrave Friedrich. To counter this threat, he instead gathered his own troops in 1411 and allied himself with Friedrich V von Heldrungen and his Fleglern in 1412.

Tired of the anger and worried that Günther would sell parts of the Wettin territory, Margrave Wilhelm II finally moved with Meißen troops via Erfurt to Gotha in July 1412 , captured the city and de facto placed Friedrich under his and his brother's tutelage. The flailers turned out to be ineffective, because disciplined and well-armed troops were no match for allies. Günther asked for mercy and compared himself to the margraves.

Friedrich von Heldrungen was not included in this settlement and was now looking for another source of income in order to maintain his crowd at the expense of others. He therefore allied himself with Count Dietrich VIII von Hohnstein , Lord of Heringen , who with his relative, Count Heinrich IX. von Hohnstein, Herr zu Kelbra , because of which, in his opinion, the unjust distribution of the Hohnstein property was in dispute. The Flegler roamed the Goldene Aue , robbing and plundering, and set many small villages on fire. The county of Hohnstein was badly devastated.

On the night of September 15, 1412 (the 18th is also mentioned), Friedrich von Heldrungen and a number of Flegler penetrated the Hohnstein Castle unnoticed in order to protect Heinrich IX. to murder. However, he escaped with the help of his wife Margarethe von Weinsberg, who helped him out of the window on a rope made of bed linen. Friedrich could only Heinrich's father Ulrich III. von Hohnstein and Heinrich's younger son captured. Legend has it that Margarethe was allowed to leave the castle with as many treasures as she could carry. Heldrungen had the conquered castle fortified and held by Fleglers. Count Heinrich fled to the Ilfeld monastery , where the abbot Friedrich von Rüstefeld helped him to get clothes, weapons and a horse, and rode to see Friedrich the militant. The Meissen then gathered troops under the field captain Hans von Thangel , besieged the Heldrungen Castle held by Fleglers and conquered it. Friedrich von Heldrungen escaped capture, but many flakers were captured and their leaders tortured to death and scourged. Then the Wiehe , which belonged to Friedrich's rule, was conquered. Heldrungen, Wiehe and all of Friedrich's remaining possessions were drawn in as forfeited fiefdoms and Heinrich IX. von Hohnstein given to fiefdom as compensation for his castle destroyed by the rebels and devastated County of Hohnstein. Dietrich von Hohnstein was Friedrich von Heldrungen Although Elbingerode as compensation, but Frederick could Elbingerode never actually take possession, but moved it were outlawed as a robber with his remaining pile of Fleglern around. Finally, on September 14, 1413 near Mackenrode , he was stabbed through the neck with a pork spear and killed by one of the flailmen who felt himself betrayed by him.

Dietrich VIII von Hohnstein feared a similar fate and submitted. He sold his share in the County of Hohnstein, along with herring and Kelbra, to Count Botho von Stolberg . He is said to have died in 1417 in a prison in the Dringenburg .

In 1416 the revolt of the Flegler was bloody and finally suppressed. Some of their leaders were tortured to death.

Notes and individual references

  1. ↑ The younger line of the sex, zu Heringen-Kelbra, had again divided into the lines Honstein-Heringen and Honstein-Kelbra in 1394.

literature