Jörg Gail

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Jörg Gail , also called Georg Gail (* between 1520 and 1528 ; † August 3, 1584 in Augsburg ), was an Augsburg schoolmaster and notary . He became known as the author of the Raißbüchlin , an itinerary printed in 1563 . It is considered to be the oldest printed German route handbook and the "most route-rich work of early European travel literature".

Life

Title page of the Raißbüchlin

Jörg Gail came from a widespread Swabian family whose members lived in Laugna , Thierhaupten , Niederroth and Kempten, among others . His father Hans Geil was a mercenary in the service of the city of Augsburg from 1538. He died at the end of 1568. This emerges from the so-called tax book of that year, which is kept in the Augsburg city archive and in which the last payment of wages (December 15, 1568) is recorded. Nothing is known about Gail's mother. His exact date of birth could not yet be determined either. The Gail biographer Friedrich Blendinger gives the period between 1520 and 1528 due to various factors and suspects that he was “probably born as a soldier's child” and that he “ traveled a long way in the family of his father's farmhands” at a young age. The latter would fit in with a remark by Jörg Geil that can be found in the preface to his Raißbüchlin . There it says to the address of the “favorably dear reader”: “Because I (maybe out of God's forgiveness.) My day and time for thai / and especially six years ago in foreign countries / and a / little way in Teütsch / Welschland and France crossed / I kept a memorial for such raises [...] ”.

Jörg Gail first appeared in the tax lists of the city of Augsburg in 1550. This was preceded by his marriage to the wealthy widow Ursula Bitzelhofer. She was in her first marriage with the Augsburg Rechenmeister married George Dietel. This connection resulted in five daughters whom she brought into the new marriage. She owned a house on St. Katharinen-Gasse in the immediate vicinity of the Fugger houses. After moving in, Jörg Gail ran a private school as well as a notary's office and a typing office . It must have acquired a certain importance for Augsburg, because when the Free Imperial City was occupied by imperial troops on September 12, 1552 after the prince uprising , both Jörg Gail and a certain “school keeper” Afra Wild were released from the obligation to rent the premises of their houses to be made available for the billeting of mercenaries; teaching should continue undisturbed.

There were serious arguments between Jörg and Ursula Gail in the last years of their marriage, in connection with which even the city council of Augsburg was repeatedly called upon. In 1562 Jörg Gail sued his wife because she refused to let him have sex . The council referred the two to the court. The wife was ordered not to oppose the fulfillment of marital duties or to apply to the ecclesiastical consistory to initiate divorce proceedings . The Council decision seems to have had no effect, because it was confirmed again about eight weeks later. At the end of May 1564 Jörg Gail complained again to the council against his wife and was referred from there to the consistory . Ursula Gail seems to have passed away before a formal divorce was finalized. This was followed by inheritance disputes with his wife's minor daughters or with their guardians, the gunsmith and cutler Oswald Salzhuber and the barber Jörg Prendle.

Even before the death of his first wife, Jörg Gail published his route handbook Raißbüchlin via the Augsburg printer Valentin Otmar . Prior to publication, he went to Innsbruck to present the concept of his project to the imperial court. The aim of his trip was to obtain an imperial printing privilege for his book and thus to obtain copyright and publisher protection. This privilege was granted to him by Emperor Ferdinand I on May 7, 1563 for a period of 10 years. According to this, during this period his work was "neither secretly nor publicly reprinted, distributed, carried around or sold". Violations were to be punished with “10 marks of soldered gold”, half of which was to be paid to the imperial chamber, the other half to Jörg Gail. Confiscated reprints - according to the privilege - are also to be handed over to Jörg Gail, who can then trade with them at will. Gail appreciated the imperial guarantee of copyright protection by inserting a portrait of Ferdinand I on the front page of his Raißbüchlin and also a description of the "ancient weeg so the Roman -] - Kay [serliche] May [estät] Anno [ 15] 63 same personally torn ”prefixed.

Shortly after his return from Innsbruck, Jörg Gail discovered that his itinerary had gotten competition. Both the well-known Augsburg printer Philipp Ulhart and a certain Georg Mair had each published a route manual and received an imperial privilege for it. While Ulhart's work has probably been lost, an itinerary written by Mair has been preserved. On July 20, 1563, the city council of Augsburg instructed the three competitors to submit their travel books. On July 29, the council decided that “every privilege should remain with each other”, “because the individual parties would probably not act against the privileges and know how to protect themselves from harm and disadvantage.”

On August 26, 1563, "the west schoolmaster" Jörg Gail received permission from the Augsburg Wedding Office to enter into a second marriage. Gail married Margareta Mair from Sontheim . The two landlords Jacob Mair and Lorenz Schiesser provided the guarantee required by the city of Augsburg for the “foreign” bride. In the period that followed, Gail, who had meanwhile moved to the Windbrunnen district of Salta , applied to be allowed to work as a schoolmaster again. The competent authorities rejected the multiple applications just as often. There are no known reasons for this. It does not seem until 1578 that he was allowed to take over the post of a deceased teacher. The publication of his Raißbüchlin obviously did not bring him the desired economic success, which the Augsburg tax lists prove. When he died on August 3, 1584, he owed the Augsburg city ​​bag the not insignificant amount of 4 guilders.

The Raißbüchlin

Two sides of the Raißbüchlin : Route Vienna – Sibiu

The full title of Gail's route handbook is: A new and useful Raißbüchlin from furnemesten Land vnnd Stett, made by me, Jörg Gail, Burger zu Augspurg in truck . The work had been forgotten for centuries and was only rediscovered almost simultaneously in two different libraries in 1950 through “systematic title research on the one hand [and] archival chance on the other hand”.

When Raißbüchlin is a small-scale work ( type area : 8.0 x 5.5 cm; outer size: 11.5 × 8.0 cm). It comprises 272 pages and describes 161 individual European routes with around 2400 individual stages named. As sources for his directions - so Jörg Gail in the foreword of his little book - he used the already mentioned memorial of his own travels as well as the travel reports “from good friends and good people”, from which he “collected nice and funny ways”. Krüger proved that Gail also incorporated itineraries and atlases by other authors into his work, including an Upper German route directory that was compiled by an unknown hand around 1520 on a 6 cm wide and 2 meter long parchment tape. A lockable metal tube was used to store it. Gail's Raißbüchlin has demonstrably influenced travel literature until the middle of the 17th century. For example, the works of the Rothenburg cartographer Georg Conrad Jung and his father Johann Georg can largely be traced back to Gail's route manual. The Parisian engraver and map maker Jean Boisseau also shows a clear dependence on Gail when it comes to depicting the Flemish , Hessian and southern German regions.

The draftsman and form cutter Hans Rogel used Gail's little book to develop his Augsburg mile disc.

literature

  • Herbert Krüger: The oldest German route manual. Jörg Gail's “Raißbüchlin”. With 6 route maps and 272 original pages in a facsimile , Graz 1974, ISBN 3-201-00820-6
  • Friedrich Blendinger: From the life of the schoolmaster and notary Jörg Gail , in: Archive for German Postal History , 1/1970, pp. 67–70
  • Herbert Krüger: Jörg Gails Augsburger 'Raißbüchlin' from 1563 , in: Archive for German Postal History , 2/1969, pp. 10-17
  • Hermann Wolpert: Oldest German course book found , in: Archive for Postal History in Bavaria , 2/1950, pp. 139–142

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Herbert Krüger: The oldest German route handbook. Jörg Gail's “Raißbüchlin”. With 6 route maps and 272 original pages in the facsimile , Graz 1974, p. XI
  2. ↑ The information in this section is based - unless otherwise noted - on Friedrich Blendinger: From the life of the schoolmaster and notary Jörg Gail , in: Archive for German Post History , 1/1970, pp. 67–70
  3. ^ Friedrich Blendinger: From the life of the schoolmaster and notary Jörg Gail , in: Archive for German Postal History , 1/1970, p. 67, Sp I
  4. ↑ verzört = consumed
  5. ↑ Jörg Gail: A new useful Raißbüchlin of the furnemesten Land vnnd Stett, made by me, Jörg Gail, Burger zu Augspurg in truck , Augsburg 1563, sheet II; see facsimile of the Raißbüchlin from Herbert Krüger: The oldest German route manual. Jörg Gail's “Raißbüchlin”. With 6 route maps and 272 original pages in a facsimile , Graz 1974, p. 357
  6. ↑ Friedrich Blendinger refers in this connection to the Ratsbuch der Stadt Augsburg , Volume XXV, p. 23b; see Friedrich Blendinger: From the life of the schoolmaster and notary Jörg Gail , in: Archive for German Postal History , 1/1970, p. 70 (note 16)
  7. ↑ Here is the illustration of a halberd forged by Salzhuber: Helmut Nickel, Stuart W. Pyhrr, Leonid Tarassuk: The Art of Chivalry: European Arms and Armor from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (exhibition catalog), New York 1982, p. 120
  8. ↑ For Otmar see Christoph Reske: The book printers of the 16th and 17th centuries in the German-speaking area. Based on the work of the same name by Josef Benzing. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2007 ISBN 978-3-447-05450-8 (Contributions to books and librarianship 51), p. 39 ( partly accessible in the Google book search) and Hans-Jörg Künast: Otmar. Buchdruckerfamilie (2010) in the Augsburger Stadtlexikon ( Memento of the original from April 15, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.stadtlexikon-augsburg.de
  9. ^ Herbert Krüger: Jörg Gails Augsburger 'Raißbüchlin' from the year 1563 , in: Archive for German Postal History , 2/1969, p. 11, Sp I
  10. ↑ Quotations from Friedrich Blendinger: From the life of the schoolmaster and notary Jörg Gail , in: Archive for German Postal History , 1/1970, p. 68, Sp II
  11. ↑ Jörg Gail: A new useful Raißbüchlin of the furnemesten Land vnnd Stett [...] , Augsburg 1563, [p. 12] (facsimile); Herbert Krüger: The oldest German route manual. Jörg Gails Raißbüchlin , Graz 1974, p. 359
  12. ↑ The Mair itinerary that has survived is a new edition of the 1563 version published in 1590; Herbert Krüger proved that this new Wegbüchlin is largely to be regarded as a reprint of Gail's route manual. See Herbert Krüger: The oldest German route manual. Jörg Gails Raißbüchlin , Graz 1974, p. 5
  13. ↑ Stadtarchiv Augsburg: Ratsbuch XXXII , p. 70a; quoted from Friedrich Blendinger: From the life of the schoolmaster and notary Jörg Gail , in: Archive for German Postal History , 1/1970, p. 68, Sp I
  14. ^ So the catalog is a description of the German schoolmasters , Augsburg 1694; quoted from Friedrich Blendinger: From the life of the schoolmaster and notary Jörg Gail , in: Archive for German Postal History , 1/1970, p. 69 Sp II
  15. ^ Herbert Krüger: Jörg Gails Augsburger 'Raißbüchlin' from 1563 , in: Archive for German Postal History , 2/1969, p. 13, Sp I
  16. ^ Herbert Krüger: Jörg Gails Augsburger 'Raißbüchlin' from the year 1563 , in: Archive for German Postal History , 2/1969, p. 11, Sp I and II
  17. ^ Herbert Krüger: The oldest German route handbook. Jörg Gails Raißbüchlin , Graz 1974, p. 4f
  18. ^ Herbert Krüger: The oldest German route handbook. Jörg Gails Raißbüchlin , Graz 1974, p. 14
personal data
SURNAME Gail, Jörg
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gail, Georg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Schoolmaster, notary, author of the Raißbüchlin itinerary
DATE OF BIRTH between 1520 and 1528
DATE OF DEATH August 3, 1584
Place of death augsburg