Johann Parricida

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Miniature around 1579/87 by Antoni Boys called Anton Waiss, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna
Assassination of King Albrecht I (Austrian Chronicle of the 95 Dominions, end of the 14th century)

Johann von Schwaben, Duke of Austria and Steyer , called Parricida , Latin for murderer of father or relative , (* 1290 ; † possibly December 13, 1313 in Pisa ) was the nephew and murderer of Albrecht I.

Life

Johann was the son of Duke Rudolf of Swabia and the Bohemian king's daughter Agnes .

He was born shortly before or after the death of his father and probably lived with his mother in Habsburg Switzerland from 1291, preferably in Brugg an der Aare. There he is attested as a duke in a deed of gift dated April 1, 1294.

After his mother's death on May 17, 1296, Johann began urging his uncle, King Albrecht I, to surrender his paternal inheritance again and again from 1306 onwards - above all the compensation he claimed for his renunciation of co- rule in accordance with the Rheinfelden house rules of 1283 could, but never had received - and the Wittum of his mother, the Kyburg estates around Lenzburg and Baden , which Albrecht administered as his guardian.

But since Albrecht put him off again and John, who so as hertzog anlant - Duke without a country - was ridiculed, denied the extradition of its heritage, conspired this with the Upper Swabian knights Rudolf von Wart Rudolf, Balm , Walter von Eschenbach based at Oberhofen Castle and Konrad von Tegerfelden against the king and murdered his uncle on May 1, 1308 near Windisch an der Reuss , today in Switzerland.

Albrecht was on his way home to his wife when the assassins ambushed him. His nephew Johann rode up to him and split his skull in two. The evening before, Johann had been present at a banquet given by Albrecht in Winterthur. At a late hour Albrecht had each of his guests there handed a wreath of flowers, which Johann threw in his uncle's face, shouting that he was too old to continue to be fed with flowers and that he wanted what he was entitled to. The festival was then ended prematurely.

Johann and his co-conspirators fled. The following year, in September 1309, the regicide was ostracized by the new King Heinrich of Luxembourg in Speyer and their property was confiscated.

In 1312, in the garb of an Augustinian monk, Johann asked Heinrich for mercy. In Pisa he threw himself at his feet. Heinrich then picked up the eight. Johann was sent to the Benedictine monastery of San Nicola in Pisa. He died in 1313 and received a dignified burial.

Literary processing

Friedrich Schiller took over the incident in his drama Wilhelm Tell . In the first scene of the fifth act it says:

Stauffacher
It is certain. At Bruck, King Albrecht fell
by the hand of a murderer - a man worthy of faith,
Johannes Müller brought it from Schaffhausen.
Walther Fürst
Who dared such a horrific act?
Stauffacher
It is made even more horrific by the perpetrator.
It was his nephew, his brother's child,
Duke Johann von Schwaben, who made it happen.

In the following second scene of the fifth act, Parricida appears in Tell's house and asks him for help. Like him, he had avenged himself on his enemy (in Tell's case, Governor Gessler). Tell rejects this argument - in his eyes Parricida is a murderer, while he himself defended his family. But he helps him by showing him the way to Italy and advising him to ask the Pope for absolution.

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff takes up the fate of Johann in her ballad Der Graf von Thal . This plans a revenge murder on the uncle of his wife. The woman, who is in unswerving loyalty to her husband, learns of this. As a pleading request and warning, she sings a song to her husband that she heard from a minstrel and that is sung in the upper realm . This song comprises three stanzas within the ballad with different rhyme and meter. The last of these stanzas reads:

Oh dear! you didn't think so,
Johann! Johann!
When you made vengeance true
On the old man.
And woe! The curse
will never be buried with you,
you who killed the ohm and master,
Johann von Schwaben!

Johann Nepomuk Vogl wrote the ballad The Monk of Pisa about the supposed end of Parricida's life in the monastery of Pisa

A
gloomy monk goes to Pisa in the monastery garden , where there is flower by flower.
His face is pale with long grief,
one does not know who he was or where he came from.

In the following stanzas the ballad describes the remorse and despair of the unknown monk. The final stanza is:

But when spring comes back into the country,
the monk did not stand by the flowers again.
He does not listen to the singers in the heights,
but a new grave was to be seen for it;
a simple stone in a gray monastery wall ,
on which JOHANNES PARRICIDA was written.

Carl Loewe set this ballad to music as his op.114.

Historical novels

  • CF Mandien: The Imperial Murderers. Historical-romantic painting from the beginning of the 14th century. - Quedlinburg: Basse, 1826
  • Heinrich August Müller: Johann von Schwaben, or the murder of the emperor Albrecht. Historic-romantic painting from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. - Quedlinburg and Leipzig: Basse, 1829
  • Thomas Bornhauser : Duke Johann or regicide and blood revenge. - St. Gallen: Kälin, 1844

Historical dramas

  • August Gottlieb Meißner : Johann von Schwaben. A play. - Leipzig 1780
  • Wilhelm Ferdinand Zernecke: Johann von Schwaben. Tragedy in five acts. - Berlin 1830
  • Rudolf Neumeister: Johann von Schwaben. Tragedy in 5 acts. - Leipzig 1841
  • Moritz Blanckarts : Johann von Schwaben. Historical drama in 5 lifts. - Dresden: Meinhold, 1863
  • Julius Grosse : Johann von Schwaben. Tragedy in five acts. - Leipzig: Weber 1870

literature

Remarks

  1. ↑ Johann's biography in the German biography
  2. ↑ Claudia Garnier : In the sign of war and compromise. Forms of symbolic communication in the early 14th century. In: Matthias Becher , Harald Wolter-von dem Knesebeck (Hrsg.): The King's rise of Frederick the Beautiful in 1314: Coronation, War and Compromise. Cologne 2017, pp. 229–253, here: p. 243 f.
predecessor Office successor
Konradin Duke of Swabia
1290–1308 		King Henry VII (HRR)
personal data
SURNAME Johann Parricida
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Johann of Swabia
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Duke of Austria and Styria
DATE OF BIRTH 1290
DATE OF DEATH on December 13, 1313