Johann von den Birghden

Johann von den Birghden (1639)

Johann von den Birghden (born August 7, 1582 in Aachen , † March 4, 1645 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German postmaster . He came from an Evangelical Lutheran family. From 1615 to 1628 he was postmaster and organizer of the Imperial Imperial Post and from December 1631 to 1635 Royal Swedish Postmaster. He was the founder of the first German postal newspaper .

education

Johann von den Birghden was the son of Peters von den Birghden. The mother's name was either Adelheit Frisch von Haßdahl or Petronella Feissen. In 1599 Johann von den Birghden became the assistant to the Rheinhausen post office administrator Matthias Sulzer . When he was appointed post administrator in Frankfurt on August 10, 1610, he followed him. After Sulzer's death on October 3, 1611, Lamoral von Taxis appointed Sulzer's son Hans Georg as his successor, not von der Birghden . Thereupon Johann von den Birghden resigned from the service of the Imperial Post Office and in 1612 acquired a privately operated messenger service from Frankfurt to Hamburg. In 1613 he married a widow who ran a spice trade in Frankfurt.

Postal requirements

After the establishment of the Imperial Post Office in 1597, there were initially only two postal routes in the empire. One led from Brussels via Rheinhausen , Augsburg , Innsbruck and Trento to Italy and the other from Cologne via Wöllstein to Augsburg. An expansion took place between 1598 and 1601 from Cologne via Frankfurt to Rheinhausen. This postal network remained unchanged until 1615.

Postmaster and organizer in Frankfurt

The Fettmilch uprising in 1614 completely brought letters from Frankfurt to a standstill. After Sulzer's departure, Johann von den Birghden received the certificate of appointment as postmaster in Frankfurt on October 24, 1615. He made a decisive contribution to the expansion of the Imperial Post Office and immediately began to stabilize the routes to Cologne and Nuremberg. As a Lutheran, he managed to set up further postal courses to Leipzig and Hamburg in just a few months . On November 20, 1615, Johann von den Birghden appointed the Leipzig messenger Johann Sieber as imperial postmaster against the resistance of the Frankfurt messenger Johann Adam Uffsteiner . By the end of June 1616, the postal route from Frankfurt via Fulda , Suhl and Erfurt to Leipzig was established. By the end of August 1616, von den Birghden organized a new postal route from Hamburg to Cologne via Rotenburg , Detmold , Unna and Schwelm . In Hamburg, Johann von den Birghden appointed Albrecht Kleinhans postmaster. This postal course ended in Frankfurt. With the route from Cologne via Frankfurt, Nuremberg to Prague, which was created in 1615, the Imperial Post Office now had a postal network with Frankfurt as its center. In 1619 Bremen was connected to the Hamburg-Frankfurt route via Nienburg / Weser .

The first postal newspaper

In the second half of the 16th century, some mail and messenger masters conveyed handwritten messages to interested customers for a fee. When a bookseller in Frankfurt published its first printed newspaper in 1615, Johann von den Birghden took over the idea. As a postmaster, he received news all the time, and so he published it in a postal newspaper. In January 1617, the Frankfurt printer Egenolff Emmel complained to the city council against the publication of a newspaper . The reference to the fact that a newspaper had not yet been published by a postmaster, but only by a printer, was enough to encourage the Birghden to ban newspaper printing. The postmaster then simply left the newspaper to continue printing in the neighboring Höchst and as a result he was able to have the ban lifted. This first postal newspaper was soon followed by other postmasters.

Further career

In the next few years, Johann von den Birghden, under the postmaster general of Brussels, Lamoral von Taxis, became the key contact for looking after the postal network in the Holy Roman Empire . He controlled the work of the post office keepers, had posters printed with the postal rates and price tables and thus increased the punctuality and the scope of the mail transport. The first crisis came in 1623. He was summoned to Aschaffenburg, where the curb bishop of Mainz resided, in January, held prisoner for seven weeks and then released. The reasons remained unclear. In Cologne in the same year the local postmaster Jacob Henot had the postmaster's office, which had been lost in 1603, back from the emperor. He now also raised claims to the postmaster position in Frankfurt. Johann von den Birghden refused and delayed the imperial decision about it.

After the death of the general heir postmaster Lamoral von Taxis on July 7, 1624, his son Leonhard II von Taxis succeeded him. Leonhard's goal was centralization in Brussels, and he no longer wanted to tolerate independent postmasters in the Reich. At first, Johann von den Birghden remained unmolested. On October 7, 1625 he was raised to the nobility by the emperor. After Henot's death on November 17, 1625 and the reinstatement of the postmaster Johann von Coesfeld in February 1626, the pressure on the Frankfurt postmaster increased. Since Johann von den Birghden was a Lutheran, it was easy for Leonhard to defame him as a traitor at the imperial court.

Deposition

On March 3, 1627 Leonhard II von Taxis received the order from the emperor to remove Johann von den Birghden from his office on suspicion of hostile conspiracy. Leonhard came to Frankfurt in August, stayed there until 1628 and appointed the Catholic Gerard Vrints as Birghden's successor. Leonhard died in Prague on May 23, 1628. Von der Birghden took over the city messenger service to Cologne and Antwerp in early 1628 and harassed his successor Vrints.

Swedish takeover of the Reichspost

In July 1630 Sweden entered the Thirty Years War with the attack against Pomerania. After the Swedish King Gustav Adolf entered Frankfurt on November 27, 1631, the imperial postmaster Vrints fled to Brussels and Johann von den Birghden took over the postmaster's office in Frankfurt again. On December 4, 1631, Gustav Adolf gave him the letter of appointment as postmaster general of the empire. Within a very short time, von den Birghden organized mail courses from Frankfurt to Hamburg via Hildesheim and Celle , Leipzig, Strasbourg, Metz, Madrid and Venice. The next year the Imperial Post Office lost all important post offices in the empire except Cologne.

resignation

After the reconquest of Frankfurt by the imperial family, Johann von den Birghden resigned from his office on May 22, 1635. The Swedish post office was closed on June 11, 1635, Gerard Vrints returned to Frankfurt and reopened an imperial post office in October 1635. The emperor accused Johann von den Birghden of treason and sent a commissioner to Frankfurt. Despite general amnesty, von der Birghden had to pay a fine of 6,000 guilders to the emperor. He continued his own trial before the Reichshofrat from 1627 without success until his death.

Aftermath

Johann von den Birghden died on March 4, 1645 and was buried in Frankfurt's Peterskirchhof . His work left its mark. He was the founder of the first postal newspaper and was the first to have postal posters printed with all routes and tariffs. Its technical and organizational improvements were taken over by both the Imperial Post Office and the Protestant imperial estates when they founded their own regional post offices.

literature

• Wolfgang Behringer: In the sign of Mercury , Göttingen 2003, ISBN 3-525-35187-9
• Martin Dallmeier: Sources for the history of the European postal system , Kallmünz 1977
• Bernhard Faulhaber: History of the Post Office in Frankfurt am Main , 1883
• Ernst Kelchner:  Birghden, Johann von den . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1875, pp. 658-660.
• Karl Heinz Kremer: Johann von den Birghden 1582-1645. Imperial and Royal Swedish Postmaster in Frankfurt edition lumière, Bremen 2005, ISBN 3-934686-25-7
• Karl Heinz Kremer, Johann von den Birghden 1582–1645. The German Emperor and the Swedish King Postmaster in Frankfurt am Main, in: Archive for German Postal History 1/1984, pp. 7–43.
• Georg Stail:  Birghden, Johann von den. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1955, ISBN 3-428-00183-4 , p. 255 ( digitized version ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ On the year of death see the monograph by Karl Heinz Kremer: Johann von den Birghden. edition lumière, Bremen 2005, p. 468 with quotation of the former epitaph. " Epitaphium Birghdianum. In 1645 the 4th of March in Christ, his Redeemer, the noble and fortress Mr. Johannes von den Birghden fell asleep. Rom. Kays. May. Erb - aristocratic servant, old postmaster and prince. Würtenbergischer Rath, his age 63rd year. “Since a number rotated in the ADB, the year 1654 is often incorrectly given as the year of death in the literature.
2. ^ Contradictory information, see the monograph by Karl Heinz Kremer :, p. 43.
3. ↑ Wolfgang Behringer, Imzeichen des Merkur, Göttingen 2003 ISBN 3-525-35187-9 , pp. 383–385.