Lucerne murder night

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Lucerne murder night: the boy at the stove, aquatint around 1800

The Lucerne Murder Night is a dispute in the city of Lucerne that is said to have occurred in 1343 between supporters of the Habsburg rule and friends of the Confederates . Little is known about the real occurrences of the event, which could be related to the Swiss Habsburg Wars.

It remains unclear whether the attack was actually carried out at night without prior termination of the peace. For the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, several such murder nights have been handed down in the Confederation, such as the murder night in Zurich in 1350. Sources from Lucerne speak of an uflouff on July 25, 1343 . Subsequently, the council and the municipality are said to have decided to criminalize special connections between individual citizens, opposition to the federal government and the confederates, as well as questioning urban freedoms. According to the Chronicle of Johannes von Winterthur, on the other hand, the townspeople ( populares ) drove seven powerful citizens ( potenciores ) who were hostile to the Duke of Austria from the town.

legend

The events were brought forward by a decade in Lucerne's historical tradition due to a changed self-image. They were associated with the conclusion of the Lucerne League on November 7, 1332. The alliance of Lucerne with the three forest sites was now regarded as a fighting alliance against Habsburg, the establishment of which the supporters of the rule of Austria tried to prevent. The incident was declared the night of the murder and embellished with features of a legend : the boy who overheard the conspirators revealed his secret to the stove in the butcher's drinking room, alerted the unsuspecting friends of the Confederates and saved the city.

The Lucerne-based Petermann Etterlin presented this version in his chronicle printed in 1507 and dated the event on June 29, 1332. The aforementioned Zurich Murder Night could have served as a model for his interpretation, where the motif of saving the city from mortal danger also appears. Aegidius Tschudi relied largely on Etterlin, but saw on the night of the murder an attempt to reverse the alliance with the Confederates and dated it on June 29, 1333.

musical

An open-air musical , which was performed in Lucerne from May 24 to June 8, 2013, freely followed the legend of the Lucerne night of murder. The work is entitled "Oh Oven, Oh Oven ..." and was written by Klemens J. Brysch. The focus of the action is the poor fisherman's boy Andreas.

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