Hans Spiess

Bar trial and execution (Chronicle of Diebold Schilling the Younger, 1513)

Hans Spiess (* in Hergiswil near Willisau ; † 1503 in Ettiswil ) was a mercenary who was sentenced to death for murder. After a divine judgment , a so-called Bahrprobe , he was found guilty and executed.

Valerius Anshelm reports in his Berner Chronik in an entry under the year 1503 that Hans Spiess, a warrior, fornicator, spoiler, prasser, suffocated his wife Margret in bed and then left home early as usual. No sooner was she buried than the rumor spread that her husband had killed her. Spiess was tortured in Willisau. Since he protested his innocence despite the torture, a divine judgment was ordered in the form of a bar test, in which the defendant, naked and shorn, had to swear his innocence on the victim's corpse - if the corpse was bleeding, he should be guilty. Twenty days after the funeral, the body was dug up again in Ettiswil. According to tradition, the corpse is said to have actually bled when Spiess approached it and thus proved his guilt, whereupon he confessed to the crime. Despite pleading for mercy, he was whacked as a convicted murderer. A quote from Anshelms Chronicle:

And so, since this miserable, gruesome appearance was added, the closer he went, the more she threw a shum to her mouth, the more he might see her; And when he even came over to it, and it should be heavy, it became discolored and began to bleed, that it ran down through the Baar, so he fell down on his knees, known to be murder, and desires mercy.

Spiess had to be naked and shorn during the bar test in order to prevent magical manipulations that were thought to be possible at the time, for example in the form of hidden amulets. The belief that God would let the wounds of a victim break open again in the presence of the perpetrator was so accepted that a judge in the early 16th century still saw this as evidence, as Peter Dinzelbacher writes in The Foreign Middle Ages - God's Judgment and Animal Trial .

The case is mentioned in several contemporary chronicles: in the Bern chronicle already cited by Valerius Anshelm (1529–1546), the Lucerne chronicler Petermann Etterlin (1507) and Diebold Schilling (1513). However, court records have not been preserved.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Family tree Spiess
2. ↑ ^{a b} Rudolf Emanuel Stierlin, Johann Rudolf Wyss (ed.): Valerius Anshelm's, called Rüd, Berner Chronik from the beginning of the city of Bern to 1526 . tape 3 . Bern 1827, p. 254 ( full text in Google Book Search).
3. ↑ Peter Dinzelbacher: The foreign Middle Ages. Judgment and Animal Trial . Magnus Verlag, Essen 2006, ISBN 3-88400-504-9 , p. 27 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
4. ^ Petermann Etterlin: Kronica from the laudable Eydtgnoschaft . In: Eugen Gruber (Ed.): Source work on the emergence of the Swiss Confederation. Dept. 3: Chronicles and Poems . tape 3 . Sauerländer, Aarau 1965, p. 319-320 .
5. ↑ Alfred A. Schmid (ed.): The Swiss picture chronicle of Diebold Schilling . Facsimile-Verlag, Lucerne 1981, ISBN 3-85672-018-9 , p. 328-331 .

literature

• Gerhard Köbler: Pictures from German legal history . CH Beck, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-406-32880-6 , p. 163 ( full text on author's website [accessed April 15, 2015]).