Greifensee murder
| date | May 1, 1444 to May 28, 1444 |
|---|---|
| place | Greifensee ZH |
| output | Victory of the Confederates |
| consequences | Destruction of Greifensee |
| Parties to the conflict | |
|---|---|
|
|
|
| Commander | |
| Troop strength | |
| approx. 70 | |
| losses | |
|
approx. 62-68 |
|
Etzel · Pfäffikon · Grüningen I · Freienbach · Blickensdorf · Hirzel · Bremgarten · Regensberg · Grüningen II · St. Jakob an der Sihl · Greifensee · St. Jakob an der Birs · Erlenbach I · Koblach · Sargans · Wil · Kirchberg · Wolfhalden · Obertoggenburg · Wigoltingen · Erlenbach II · Männedorf · Wollerau · Ragaz
The massacre of the Central Swiss army of the occupation of the Zurich fortress Greifensee during the Old Zurich War went down in history as the murder of Greifensee - also known as the "Bloody Night" or "Bloody Act of Greifensee" .
On 27 May 1444, after 4 weeks of siege, the surviving 62 mostly rural defenders had led by Wildhans of width Landsberg result . Except for two, one contemporary witness names ten, the surviving crew of Greifensee was beheaded on May 28, 1444 by the victorious Central Switzerland with the sword on the "Blood Mat" in Nänikon - and thus presumably the majority of the population of the Greifensee district in "manhood" killed and left their families to an uncertain fate.
“It was the most pathetic thing that one had ever seen. A good part of the executed were only poor farmers who were innocent of the war, ”writes the Schwyz chronicler and eyewitness Hans Fründ .
Several chroniclers have documented the siege from May 1 to May 27, 1444 and the execution of the Zurich occupation on May 28, 1444 for posterity.
Siege of the town from May 1st to 13th, 1444
Central Swiss army under the Schwyzer Landammann Ital Reding the Elder invaded the Zurich hinterland ( Landvogteien Grüningen and Greifensee ) after unsuccessful peace negotiations in Baden . On May 1, 1444, they reached the town of Greifensee, the last Zurich bastion to be fortified outside the city of Zurich .
The armed forces from the Waldstätte - Uri , Schwyz and Unterwalden - from Zug , Lucerne , Glarus , Bern and Appenzell , which have not been quantified in terms of numbers, were discovered by the defenders on May 1, 1444 as they approached Greifensee. The Zurich occupation, under the command of Captain Wildhans von Breitenlandenberg, is said to have defended itself "grimly" from the first attack and killed and wounded an unknown number of attackers by fire, reports the Schwyz chronicler and war veteran Hans Fründ.
The 70 defenders at the beginning of the siege saw themselves numerically unable to hold both the town and the Greifensee Castle at the same time, given the enemy superiority - after twelve days of siege, the crew set fire to their town to keep it out of the hands of the attackers to drop, and "burned that in the ground and what in it something of rossen, rindren, kuyen, and otherwise vich and vil guotz of grain and habern, which the lüt had flown in it [fled]."
Women and children are said to have been evacuated to the city of Zurich before the attackers approached, but by no means all of them, as can be read again in the chronicle of the eyewitness Fründ: “The poor frowen with the children to the holes, basements and blinds herus with iren children and helping one another, as sy liked, and came so poor, crouching and bare in bad clothes, to the confederates in great deceitfulnesses (...) and whoever is so miserable and miserable must be pitiful and miserable with inen Han. " The attackers showed mercy with the families of the defenders and, presumably, refugees from homesteads in the region and brought these 46 civilians to safety in Uster , accompanied by two men, including the chronicler Fründ.
Siege of Greifensee Castle from May 13th to 27th, 1444
The defenders withdrew to the castle complex, which was then still directly on the Greifensee , and barricaded themselves. They were besieged for another two weeks without success, and the attackers suffered heavy losses in mutual shelling. The bombardment was ineffective in view of the 4 to 4.5 meter thick castle walls, “everything shoots wz nüt different than you have thrown at it with a snowball”, so a statement from the chronicle of Gerold Edlibach .
A “traitor” from the Greifensee office had shown the attackers that the walls on the lake side were the thinnest and advised them to tunnel under Greifensee Castle , which was built on a molasse rock around three meters high , in order to bring the walls to collapse.
In addition, it must be added that the tactics of the federal heap of violence were aimed at open field battles or ambushes and that they therefore did not carry any siege devices with them or had little experience with them, which probably also applied to the defenders of Greifensee with regard to the defense against siege devices . While the federal miners were at work, the defenders removed the massive altar stone from the castle chapel , tipped it onto the miners' protective roof and used it to kill the men below.
This recent failure aroused "anger and anger" among the attackers and they continued their mining work with a new protective roof. At this point about 4 feet wide southwestern wall gave way and the besiegers were about to being propelled under the castle tunnel and the Palas to bring down.
The defenders could no longer find a stone large enough to prevent the miners from pursuing their project, which was about to succeed. According to Hans Fründ's account, on this Tuesday before Pentecost, May 26, 1444, the besieged offered to surrender and even negotiated with the attackers for the first time when their situation became hopeless. The attackers refused the request of the defense lawyers to have them withdrawn “at mercy” (unscathed), angry about the recent heavy losses. According to another source, however, the defense lawyers are said to have been assured of free withdrawal; an understandable reason why the Zurich occupation should have agreed to surrender .
On the evening of May 27 1444, the Zurich crew returned after they had probably confessed their fate in anticipation - she had the danger of collapsing castle with a ladder through a window left, as the entrance insurmountable for the attackers barricaded was. The 62 surviving defenders were immediately taken prisoner, bound and sent to the «places» for the night. H. among the contingents of the cantons involved in the siege.
The Master Looter of the Confederates plundered "gros guot is what of grain, haber [oats / corn], mel, meat, husplunder [household], bed Gwand, Harnasch ( armor ) büxsen ( mortar ) and Züg of Andrem, armbrest ( crossbows ), powder and so, but lützel wins [only a little wine], who divided it up into the towns of the confederates »and then devastated the castle complex.
On May 28, 1444, the captured defenders from Greifensee were brought to Nänikon on a meadow - perhaps the army camp of Central Switzerland - where they were allowed to confess. The meadow bears the name "Blood Mat" to this day.
The massacre on May 28, 1444
The chronicler Fründ (as an eyewitness among the confederates) describes the execution of 62 defense lawyers from Greifensee in just three sentences, Edlibach reports in more detail about the apparently longer deliberations of the confederates before the start of the beheadings and the course of the massacre.
Ital Reding, the leader of the Central Swiss, is said to have pleaded for "all except Schwyz-born Zurich city servant Ueli Kupferschmid, whose brother was among the Schwyzers, to be killed." Another (leader) suggested that all the majority “peasant defenders from the Greifensee office be spared, as they only did their duty, but not the mercenaries ” - presumably the captain, his town servants and a small number of Habsburg soldiers in the service of the town Zurich. One vote advocated a pardon for everyone, including Captain Wildhans von Breitenlandenberg.
"Against the advice of reason, hatred finally got the upper hand", the resentment at the heavy losses suffered during the siege and the feeling of humiliation at the one month long siege against the only 70 defenders, mostly from farming families, was probably too great .
A majority decision was made to kill all 62 surviving Zurich defenders, which was immediately implemented. Captain Wildhans von Breitenlandenberg is said to have been the first to be beheaded, followed by his two town servants : at his request, Captain Breitenlandenberg was the first to be beheaded, so that his fellow fate did not have to believe that he would have been spared as a nobleman by the Central Swiss.
Edlibach writes that, according to imperial law, the sniper or intelligence officer claimed his tenth victim for himself and wanted to spare. However, Ital Reding ordered him to continue, because " land law applies here and not imperial law ". The same scene took place with the twentieth and thirtieth victims, but Ital Reding is supposed to mercilessly «Silence and judge!» have replied.
The historian Karl Dändliker doubted whether this description corresponds to historical reality . He assumed that Edlibach as a Zurich resident had depicted the Bern executioner as more humane for reasons of alliance policy, in order to make the Schwyzer Reding appear in an even worse light.
Regardless of this, the beheadings continued unabated, the last ones being carried out by torchlight. The defense lawyers died by the executioner's sword of execution by the evening of May 28, 1444 , only the oldest men "with grise [gray] beards" and the youngest, still boys, ten in all, were spared according to the chronicler Fründ. Most sources speak of only two survivors who owed their escape more to the chaos at the place of execution than to the mildness of the central Swiss.
On the scene of the massacre, fathers, mothers and wives, along with the children of the doomed, are said to have crying pleaded with the central Swiss leaders to show mercy for their victims and to show mercy for the distress of the bereaved, because with the execution they robbed the families of their breadwinners. All requests were in vain.
Some of the people from Central Switzerland who were present were also shocked. "Then it was a tough little need, it wasn't even dear to the male that one kills so much according to the shape and occasion of the matter ..."
The time after the massacre
The corpses of Captain Wildhans von Breitenlandenberg and his two town servants were brought to Turbenthal , the home of the Landenbergers , on May 30, 1444 and buried there. All other corpses were transferred to Uster , where Baron von Bonstetten , who resided there and was neutral during the Old Zurich War , provided the final resting place.
On May 31, 1444 , the people of Central Switzerland burned and razed the castle complex and probably also the remaining city wall of Greifensee. On Whit Monday, June 1, 1444, they withdrew to besieged the city of Zurich after further devastation of the Zurich area and were defeated only a few weeks later at the Battle of St. Jakob an der Birs .
The Gallus Chapel (current parish church, built around 1330–1340) and the «Landenberghaus» (built around 1250), which is now used as a community center, survived the Greifensee tragedy with fire damage. The rectory (part of the south wall), which also still exists today, was probably largely destroyed. For decades, Greifensee remained a ruin used as a quarry; the remains of the castle were only rebuilt from 1520 as Greifensee Castle and the official seat of the bailiff . Gerold Edlibach, from 1504 to 1506 Landvogt von Greifensee, played a major role in the reconstruction of Greifensee.
The massacre from the chronicler's point of view and popularly
The most detailed descriptions of the siege of Greifensee and the execution of the Zurich occupation come from Hans Fründ - chronicler and land clerk of Schwyz and on the side of the Central Swiss eyewitness to the siege - as well as Gerold Edlibach (* 1454) - chronicler, Zurich councilor and from 1504 to 1506 Governor of Greifensee.
Edlibach summarized the traditions of contemporaries in a comprehensive chronicle of the Old Zurich War, from the point of view of the defeated Zurichers. His “Zürcher Chronik” is more emotional and reflects the shock that the massacre left the population with as much as the historical facts. However, it can be assumed that Edlibach was able to rely on accounts from contemporary witnesses of the tragic events in Greifensee.
Fründ's description in the “Chronicle of the Old Zurich War” is short and factual, yet with undisguised sympathy for the fate of the besieged and their families, which is impressively demonstrated by the quotations here, mostly from his chronicle.
The “Die Grosse Freiburger Chronik” (1567/1568) by Franz Rudella also briefly addresses the events in May 1444: “That was given up, and Wildhans von der Breyten Landenberg, their from Zurich houptman, and mid-sixty-one man, so in it lying down, caught and all stripped on the Thursday before Pentecost ». Werner Schodoler's “ Eidgenössische Chronik ” also mentions , in the tradition of a Swiss illustrated chronicle , the siege and murder of the crew of Greifensee.
Only three months after the bloody deed in Greifensee, on August 26, 1444, the Confederates fighting against the Armagnaks at the Battle of St. Jakob an der Birs were worn down to the last man. “God's punishment for the crime of Greifensee”, interpreted the vernacular , and when the “fortunes of war” failed the Confederates, even these hardened warriors, plagued by a bad conscience for their behavior in Greifensee, believed that they were punished “by God's hand” become.
Four decades later, when Edlibach wrote his “Zürcher Chronik” from 1485 to 1486, the massacre on the Blutmatte in Nänikon was glorified and is entwined with legends : “A snow-white bird is said to have appeared over each of the 62 decapitated defenders of Greifensee and there where the heads of the decapitated crew were lined up in a circle, no grass had grown for a long time ».
Almost half a century later, Hartmann Schedel describes the events in his world chronicle of 1493 as follows:
«From the Swiss
D ie Schweitzer (a pirgigs VND frayssams multitudes) vbezohen [covered] with heerßkraft of to e rch. resisting the pu e traded ntnus [alliances] with inen Hetten vnd verwu e constant ire landscape vnd felde. Vnd when the vun to e one rch dispute with the Schweitzernn Hetten surveyed do warden they almost all vnd slay the Schweytzer raged in such grawsamkeit vnd wu e etunng ruler over the vberwundnen so hostile that they nyderlag at the end of the dead co s body zusamen carried tables and pens [benches] out of it. the co s body o e OPENED. to drunk the plu o t [blood]. And the hearts with the zen [teeth] torn. "
Memorial on the "Blood Mat"
A few years after the slaughter was on the "Bluetmatt" in Greifensee ⊙ an initially wooden chapel built. It soon became a pilgrimage site , where a funeral mass was read on the Tuesday before Pentecost . According to the year book of Uster the chapel already existed when the Zurich Council 1459. year donated to the fallen subjects. The council took the money for it from the offering box by the chapel.
According to oral tradition, the original wooden "Chapel of Our Lady" is said to have been donated in 1467 by Anna Wagner, daughter-in-law of Ital Reding the elder, who had the crew of Greifensee so mercilessly executed. It is popularly said that the «Eisenkopf von Greifensee» found no rest after the outrage on the Blutmatte until his murder in 1466, and even visited his family and relatives after his death and asked for help. For his consolation and his redemption, Anna Wagner had the first chapel built on the spot where the Greifensee crew was beheaded. It cannot be ruled out that this story is mistakenly assigned to the chapel on the Blutmatte and rather the “Reding Chapel” in Oberarth , the place of death of Ital Reding the Younger , is meant . The gruesome fairy tale was also taken up in the popular theater .
During Gerold Edlibach's tenure as governor of Greifensee (1504–1506), the dilapidated chapel was replaced by a stone building built from the ruins of Greifensee. "To your senses, gracious gentlemen, how old in wooden käpeli had been cultivated and useless." As early as 1524 began the disintegration of the chapel, as a result of the Reformation no fairs and processions longer took place. Despite heavy fines, the stones of the ruins were recycled by the residents of the area, and in 1839 the last remains of the small church had disappeared.
"Patriotic circles" in the city of Zurich erected a memorial in the form of a stone pyramid instead , which was inaugurated on October 17, 1842 with great participation by the population. In the pyramid there is a bronze plaque with the names of all the beheaded, insofar as these could still be determined. The large linden tree next to the stone fell victim to a storm in 1990; in their place two small linden trees were planted. In Nänikon, the “Bluetmattstrasse” reminds of what has happened.
Inscription on the memorial stone
Names of victims
Bluetmattstrasse
The Greifensee murder in literature and folk plays
In the historical novel Der Freihof von Aarau (1823) Heinrich Zschokke describes the events and contexts of the destruction of Greifensee from the perspective of his protagonist, the knight Marquard von Baldegg.
In 1877 Gottfried Keller processed the material of Wildhans von Breitenlandenberg , the “legendary hero of Greifensee”, and his opponent Ital Reding from Central Switzerland in Der Landvogt von Greifensee , the first volume of the “ Zurich Novellas ”, dedicated to Salomon Landolt .
Ital Reding's fate turned Albrecht Emch in his small theater play " Ital Reding, the iron head of Greifensee or the murder of Greifensee is."
In The Death of Greifensee E. Lötscher describes the events in a historical narrative.
Individual evidence
- ^ Martin Leonhard: Wildhans von Breitenlandenberg. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
- ^ State Archives of the Canton of Zurich : Urkundenregesten 1431–1445.
- ↑ Schedel'sche Weltchronik at Wikisource, pp.282v and 283r. In: Wikisource. Wikimedia, April 30, 2009, accessed May 28, 2019 .
- ↑ Jahrzeitbuch Uster (1473), Zurich Central Library, Ms. C 1, fol. 50 r .
- ↑ «… The murder of one of the most important statesmen in the state of Schwyz must be described as a special event at that time. Ital Reding the Younger, son of the older Ital Reding, was murdered in Oberarth on August 15, 1466 by a stranger from the Feldkirch area. "
- ↑ In the vernacular it is said that Ital Reding never had peace after the outrage. After his death, he kept calling his family and relatives for help and knocking on their houses as a poltergeist . For his consolation and his redemption, his wife had the "Chapel of Our Lady" built. Ital Reding has remained silent ever since. Source: "Chapel in honor of Our Lady" on the website of the parishes of Arth, Oberarth and Goldau. ( Memento of September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ).
- ↑ Excerpts from Gottfried Keller's Der Landvogt von Greifensee , on the massacre of the Zurich garrison of Greifensee on May 28, 1444: «... sixty of these men, after they finally surrendered, were executed on the square, first and foremost the faithful leader Wildhans von Landenberg . Primarily, however, he lingered in the negotiations of the war community, which took place on the mat at Nänikon about the life or death of the faithful. He described the intercession of righteous men, who fearlessly advocated mercy and leniency and pointed to the honest loyalty of the prisoners, as well as the wild speeches of the vengeful who confront those with intimidating suspicion, the passionate dialogue that was held in this way in the face of the dead and ended with the harsh judgment of blood against everyone. The mysterious cruelty with which such a great majority was revealed in the vote that it was not even counted, the immediate step forward of the executioner whom the Swiss carried in their wars, such as the doctor or field preacher now, the rushing of the umpires Old men pleading for mercy, women and children, the rigid ruthlessness of the majority and their leader Itel Reding, all of this was illustrated clearly. Then the women heard the course of execution with silent horror, like the captain of the people of Zurich, for his own man with his male To set an example in the distress of death, asking to lay down one's head first, so that no one would believe that he was hoping for a change of mind or an unforeseen event; how then the executioner, first from head to head, then paused at the tenth man and waited for grace, even pleaded for it, but always received the answer: 'Silence and judge!' up to sixty innocent people lay in their blood, last beheaded by torchlight. Only a few underage boys and broken old men escaped the judge, more out of carelessness or weariness of the judging people than out of their mercy. "
- ↑ Gottfried Keller: "Züricher Novellen". In: Project Gutenberg.
literature
- State Archives Freiburg / Friborg (Ed.): The Great Freiburg Chronicle of Franz Rudella (1567/1568) . Edition based on the copy from the Freiburg / Friborg State Archives 2005.
- Thomas Böning et al. : Gottfried Keller, Complete Works. New critical edition, comprehensively commented , 7 volumes (= BDK 41–48), Volume 5: Zurich Novellas. Frankfurt a. M. 1989
- Alfred Cattani : Zurich, 600 years in the Confederation , 1951
- Ernest Gagliardi: Histoire de la Suisse , 1925
- Rev. Heinrich Bühler: The history of the community Nänikon , 1922
- Karl Dändliker : Swiss History , 1885
- Eusèbe Henri A. Gaullieur and Charles Schaub, translated by Gotthilf Adam Heinrich Graefe: Switzerland, its history, geography and statistics , 1856
- Johann Heinrich Daniel Zschokke: The Freihof von Aarau , historical novel, 1823
- E. Lötscher: The death of Greifensee , historical story, Zurich 1941
- Werner Schodoler: Eidgenössische Chronik 1510-1535
- Gerold Edlibach: Zürcher Chronik 1485/1486 (printed in 1847)
- Bendicht Tschachtlan and Heinrich Dittlinger: Tschachtlanchronik , 1470
- Hans Fründ: Chronicle of the Old Zurich War (printed in 1875)
Web links
- Martin Illi: Old Zurich War. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
- Diethelm Zimmermann: The bloody act of Greifensee . With quotes from the chroniclers and other sources on the Greifensee community website .