Hans Ulrich von Schaffgotsch (General)

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Hans Ulrich von Schaffgotsch

Hans Ulrich von Schaffgotsch , called Semperfrei von und zu Kynast and Greiffenstein , Baron von Trachenberg auf Warmbrunn (born August 28, 1595 at Greiffenstein Castle ; † July 23, 1635 in Regensburg ) was a general of Emperor Ferdinand II during the Thirty Years' War , although a Protestant . Schaffgotsch was in the fall of 1634 Wallenstein involved, was arrested and the Emperor of the treason accused. The emperor had him executed in 1635 without Schaffgotsch's guilt having been proven or admitted under torture.

Life

Hans Ulrich von Schaffgotsch came from the rich and important Silesian noble family of the von Schaffgotsch . He was a son of Christoph von Schaffgotsch (1552-1601), imperial baron of Kynast and Greiffenstein, from his second marriage to Eleonore von Promnitz (1576-1611). Hans Ulrich was the youngest of five children.

From 1609 Schaffgotsch attended the universities of Tübingen, Altdorf and Leipzig. In the years 1611-1614 he completed his Grand Tour through Italy, Spain, France, England and the Netherlands. Then he took over the management of his extensive property independently. He had united his father's ancestral holdings , the Kynast and Greiffenstein dominions, with the Trachenberg dominion acquired by his cousin and the properties of his childless uncles, Alt Kemnitz , Hertwigswalde , Prausnitz and Schmiedeberg .

On October 18, 1620 he married Barbara Agnes von Brieg (* February 24, 1593 in Ohlau; † July 24, 1631), a daughter of the Duke of Brieg , Joachim Friedrich . The marriage had ten children.

After the estates of Bohemia had deposed King Ferdinand II, their Bohemian Confederation chose Schaffgotsch as one of the defensors of Protestantism in Silesia. The defeat of Frederick V of the Palatinate in the Battle of the White Mountains resulted in the reinstatement of Emperor Ferdinand II as King in Bohemia and thus as sovereign in Silesia. On Schaffgotsch swore allegiance to his representative in Breslau . When enemy troops under Ernst von Mansfeld and Christian of Denmark invaded Silesia in 1626 , at the request of Emperor Schaffgotsch, they opposed them with recruited troops. In the imperial army he rose to the rank of general and belonged to the circle of General Wallenstein.

In 1627 Emperor Ferdinand II gave Schaffgotsch and his descendants the title of Semperfrei with all the rights of a Silesian prince.

In the immediate vicinity of the murder of Wallenstein, Schaffgotsch fell out of favor with Ferdinand II. This is due to the close, personal bond to the Generalissimo, manifested in the Pilsen Conclusions of January 12 and 19 February 1634. The first Pilsen Conclusion was an oath of loyalty of his officers "until death" initiated by Wallenstein by the prospect of his resignation opposite, the second a half-hearted relativization, which, however, could no longer defuse the suspicion of high treason against the emperor.

Schaffgotsch was captured in Ohlau on February 24, 1634, one day before Wallenstein's death, by the Imperial Colonel of the Field Marshal and Count Colloredo . He was then taken via Glaß to Budweis in Bohemia and then to Vienna to be interrogated there. Transferred to Regensburg was charged with high treason . Despite days of repeated torture, Schaffgotsch made no (forced) confession of collaboration . Contrary to the customs of the time, which provided for the release of the tortured person in this case, Schaffgotsch was sentenced to death. The death sentence drawn up on July 5, 1635 was made out in the name of the emperor, but not signed by himself.

execution

18 days after the verdict was pronounced, Schaffgotsch was beheaded on Haidplatz in Regensburg . For his execution, Schaffgotsch had all the velvet supplies in the city bought up and used to cover the execution platform. In addition, he bought himself the right to be beheaded while sitting on a chair from the Regensburg executioner with a sum of three ducats, which was high for the time . On the day of the execution, at eight o'clock in the morning, he was brought to the place of execution in a wretched Gutschn and sat with a stool on the scaffold. After the beheading, his servants placed the body in the provided coffin made of linden wood , which was equipped with a window. The corpse was put on display for two days in the nearby “Zum Blauen Krebs” inn at 6 Krebsgasse. Schaffgotsch had expressly ordered not to wash the blood off his body and not to sew on his head.

The executioner sold the new sword used during the beheading to the officer Albrecht Freiberg from the former Schaffgotsch regiment. The hangman allegedly promised him to give up his trade now that he had already cut off a hundred heads. But he doesn't seem to have kept his word, because five years later, when the prank failed to behead a child murderer, he was killed by the angry crowd.

Burial, burial place

On July 25, 1635, at 11 o'clock in the evening, Schaffgotsch was buried, as he had wished, without a major ceremony, only by torchlight in the “ narrow corridor ” next to the newly built Protestant Trinity Church, which was then still “New Church” " was called. Even before Schaffgotsch some Swedish officers were buried there, who had died in the fighting for Regensburg from 1633 to 1634 . The Schaffgotsch grave was covered with a simple, small grave slab with names and coats of arms. His grave slab and the grave slabs of the other officers have not been preserved, but the exact locations of the former graves and the names of the officers are known from the entries on a map from 1671. The Schaffgotsch grave site is abbreviated on the old map as Mr. Graf Schafgotzky . Today the narrow southern cemetery next to the Trinity Church is called the “ ambassadorial cemetery ”, because from 1641 further burials of ambassadors took place there for Reichstag, which took place in brick tombs for hygienic reasons from 1653, whereby the burial sites were mostly decorated with splendid tombstones and memorials . At the site of the former Schaffgotsch grave site, the large epitaph of the Saxon ambassador Augustin Strauch was erected in 1674 .

After 1990, at the instigation of descendants, the congregation of the Trinity Church placed a memorial plaque in the south wall of the church opposite the shrub epitaph.

aftermath

Schaffgotsch left behind a daughter and four sons, who lost the tribe of Trachenberg and only received the goods in the Giant Mountains back in 1641 and 1650 after they converted to Catholicism (1636) . On March 11, 1634, the governor of the principalities of Schweidnitz and Jauer , Georg Ludwig Reichsgraf von Starhemberg , appeared and, in the name of the emperor , confiscated what had been the general baron Johann Ulrich v. Schaffgotsch possessed gentlemen.

"Mag v. Schaffgotsch may not have acted cautiously enough in some respects, he was certainly not a criminal, and fell only as a pitiful victim to his enemies, the Jesuits and their party, which unfortunately maintained a very important influence at the imperial court at that bad time.

For the assertion: that only envy, but especially hatred of religion, were the main causes of his sad end, speak two facts: 1) the confiscation of all his goods to the imperial chamber, and 2) the upbringing of his Protestant children by Jesuits in the Roman Catholic Confession, On the orders of Emperor Ferdinand II. … Already at the end of the last century the noble Emperor Joseph II had the acts of this trial examined by a commission which decided:
“That General Schaffgotsch was completely innocent, unjustly condemned and fallen victim to an intrigue . ""

- Patriotic pictures ... Glogau 1837, p. 455.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Genealogy Schaffgotsch
  2. ↑ Fatherland Pictures… p.450 , Glogau 1837; GoogleBooks p. 450 (further genealogical data p. 447 ff)
  3. ↑ cf. Martin Heckel: German History Vol. 5 Germany in the denominational age
  4. ↑ Schaffgotsch . In: Meyers Konversations-Lexikon 1905 on zeno.org
  5. ↑ Fatherland Pictures ... p. 453
  6. ↑ According to Chronik HV Ms. R 2, however, the head was sewn to the torso.
  7. ↑ Henkel, Schaffgotsch, p. 136 and biography Albrecht von Freiberg
  8. ↑ Klaus-Peter Rueß: The ambassador's cemetery at the Dreieinigkeitskirche in Regensburg, its origin and its construction history. State Library Regensburg, Regensburg 2015, p. 161.
  9. ↑ a b Patriotic Pictures ... p. 455
  10. ↑ Breslau, Leipzig 1757  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Aurich Landscape Library@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / emdbs2.fho-emden.de  

Remarks

  1. ↑ The eleven use of the seesaw and three hours of torture brought no new stressful moments to light (ADB)
  2. ↑ Name in the Plato-Wild-Chronik for the southern narrow churchyard, which was then used as an entrance to the sacristy


personal data
SURNAME Schaffgotsch, Hans Ulrich von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Semperfrei from and to Kynast and Greiffenstein, Freiherr von Trachenberg on Warmbrunn
BRIEF DESCRIPTION imperial general and henchman of Wallenstein during the Thirty Years' War
DATE OF BIRTH August 28, 1595
PLACE OF BIRTH Greiffenstein Castle
DATE OF DEATH July 23, 1635
Place of death regensburg