Upper Lusatian Pönfall
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| Bautzen | Goerlitz | Kamenz |
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| Lauban | Löbau | Zittau |
As Oberlausitzer Pönfall by the will Bohemian King Ferdinand I made in the summer of 1547 Punishment of the Lusatian League belonging cities ( Bautzen , Görlitz , Kamenz , Luban , Löbau and Zittau ), respectively.
occasion
The Pönfall is closely related to the Schmalkaldic War and the uprising of the Bohemian estates in 1546/47. When Ferdinand I came to the aid of his brother Emperor Charles V against the Protestant princes and cities united in the Schmalkaldic League , he also asked the estates of the Bohemian Crown Lands for military aid against the Protestants . The predominantly Protestant or Utraquist estates of Bohemia and Upper Lusatia did not want to go to the field against their fellow believers and in Bohemia the king was openly resisted. In the Upper Lusatia, on the other hand, the aristocracy and towns held a wait-and-see attitude in 1546, the negotiations with Ferdinand I were dragged out and in this way they hoped to be able to escape participation in the war. The country and cities negotiated separately with the king. At the beginning of 1547 there were no more excuses and the two estates approved the deployment of troops. The cities equipped a contingent of mercenaries for two months, which united in Saxony with the army of the Habsburg brothers. When the two months were up, the troops of the cities withdrew from the army camp on April 23, 1547, i.e. immediately before the decisive battle at Mühlberg . A royal order to continue paying the soldiers had reached the councils of the Upper Lusatian cities too late. Ferdinand interpreted the withdrawal as disobedience to his royal majesty.
The penal case
After the imperial army had defeated the Protestants and Ferdinand was able to end the uprising of the Bohemians with his entry into Prague in July 1547, the Bohemian king went to punish his unfaithful subjects . In August the representatives of the Upper Lusatian cities of Bautzen , Görlitz , Zittau , Lauban , Löbau and Kamenz were summoned to Prague to take responsibility.
The indictment contained a wide variety of offenses the cities were charged with. In addition to the problematic history with the troops, they were also accused of violating the Upper Lusatian constitution to the detriment of the king and disregarding royal orders relating to religious matters. The collection of the indictments had been launched to a large extent by representatives of the Upper Lusatian aristocracy, who saw in it a possibility of harming the cities that were enemies with them. Especially the governor of the Görlitz district Ulrich von Nostitz , a Catholic, found an open ear for his accusations in Ferdinand.
In July 1547 the king formed a special court to try the Bohemian rebels, which was mainly composed of aristocrats from neighboring countries . Thus, the enemies of the cities from the Upper Lusatian nobility also sat in court over the municipalities. The justification worked out by the cities was not even heard in Prague. After a short process, the hard verdict was pronounced:
- Loss of all city privileges , including the deprivation of city jurisdiction and free election of councils
- Assignment of all urban estates to the royal chamber
- Delivery of all weapons
- Introduction of a perpetual beer tax
- a fine of 100,000 guilders.
The mayors and councilors who had traveled to Prague were jailed until the enormous sum was paid.
The question of religion no longer played a role in the reasons for the judgment. So the cities were not punished for religious reasons. The Catholic Habsburg did not intervene in the ecclesiastical order of the Protestant communes .
The sum of the penalties actually meant that the Upper Lusatian cities had lost the dignity of a free class and were therefore no longer eligible for state assembly . At least that was the case with most of the Bohemian cities, which had to endure similarly harsh measures by the king.
Royal commissioners, who for the most part came from the Upper Lusatian nobility and were led by Ulrich von Nostitz, were commissioned to carry out the punitive measures . New councils were set up by these; the office of the city judge was now taken over by members of the nobility.
The consequences for the cities and their overcoming
The immediate consequences of the penal case were an acute lack of money because of the imposition of the fine, a threat to public order because the courts no longer functioned, the municipal bailiffs no longer had weapons and the forced councilors often enough turned out to be failures, which under normal circumstances would never have been appointed to the city governments. The supply situation in the cities also became critical. Because they had lost their estates, food had to be bought much more expensively. Even the goods of church foundations were affected, so that the poor and sick could no longer be supported in the usual way. Unrest was to be feared.
The administration of the estates confiscated in favor of the royal chamber did not function satisfactorily. The commissioners appointed turned out to be incompetent and in individual cases also to be corrupt, so that the royal chamber could hardly record any income from the new property. In view of his own financial needs, Ferdinand I was forced to quickly turn the goods into money. Most were sold below value, some even given away to supporters of the king.
The dominance of the cities over the nobility was broken once and for all by the Pönfall, but the situation in Upper Lusatia, which was not very satisfactory for all those involved, harbored the seed for a resurgence of the cities in the political structure of the margraviate .
After overcoming the first shock, the leaderships of the cities worked hard to regain the positions they had lost, and the king, too, saw that the disorder that had arisen did not bring him any long-term benefits. Step by step the cities bought back their estates, mostly on credit; They assaulted the king and the Prague Lieutenancy under Archduke Ferdinand with incessant requests for the return of their privileges, which they gradually received, although a high fee had to be paid to the Bohemian court chancellery for many of the documents . King Ferdinand showed himself gracious to the smaller and poorer cities, for example Löbau, by giving them back some properties free of charge. By 1560 the cities had regained the lower courts and the free council elections. They were already represented in the state parliaments in the old way . (On the basis of the surviving sources it cannot be decided whether they were completely excluded from it; in any case, they were not expressly forbidden from participating in the judgment of the Pönn.)
With the award of the higher courts to all aristocrats and free cities of Upper Lusatia in 1562, the municipalities had achieved the state before the Pönfall in almost everything. Only the judicial power over parts of the nobility and their subjects was denied them forever. On the other hand, the relationship with the knighthood was now much less strained than it was before 1547. This also had to do with the changed political constellations around 1560. On the one hand, both estates united in opposition to the royal bailiff Christoph von Dohna , who did not administer his office in accordance with the constitution; on the other hand, there was agreement on religious policy, because there were also no prominent representatives of the nobility a good decade after the Pönfall Catholicism more. The aristocracy and cities now worked together to obtain recognition of the Lutheran denomination under national law .
The high fines and the costs of buying back the goods and privileges had drained enormous resources from the urban economy, so that the economies of the communes were still significantly weakened decades later, especially by the councils for the repayment of debts up until the 1580s Taxes had to be collected.
Web links
- Penalty case of the Upper Lusatian Six Cities (PDF; 219 kB)
literature
- Hermann Baumgärtel: History of the Pönfall of the Upper Lusatian six cities. Bautzen 1898.
- Hanuš Härtel: Přinoški k tak mjenowanemu "Pönfallej" hornjołužiskich šesćiměstow. Contributions to the so-called "Pönfall" of the Upper Lusatian Six Cities. In: Lětopis . Volume 5/6, Bautzen 1958/59, pp. 150-227 (Sorbian), ISSN 0943-2787 .
- Matthias Herrmann (Hrsg.): Penalty case of the Upper Lusatian six cities. 1547-1997. Contributions to the autumn conference of the Upper Lusatian Society of Sciences in Görlitz eV in cooperation with the Kamenzer Geschichtsverein eV on the subject of "Pönfall of the Upper Lusatian Six Cities and Reformation" (= Kamenzer Contributions, Volume 2). Kamenz History Association, Kamenz 1999, ISBN 3-932890-03-5 .
- Matthias Herrmann: The Pönfall of the Upper Lusatian six cities and its supraregional classification. In: Joachim Bahlcke , Volker Dudeck (ed.): World - Power - Spirit. The House of Habsburg and Upper Lusatia. Oettel, Görlitz and Zittau 2002, ISBN 3-932693-61-2 , pp. 97–110.
- Theodor Neumann : Contributions to the history of the Schmalkaldic War, the Bohemian outrage of 1547, as well as the Pönfall of the Upper Lusatian Six Cities in the same year . Görlitz 1848 ( e-copy ).
- Friedrich Pietsch: Görlitz in the case of penalties. In: New Lusatian Magazine . Volume 111, Oettel, Görlitz and Zittau 1935, pp. 52–141.
- Friedrich Theodor Richter: History of the Pönfall of the Upper Lusatian six cities. In: New Lusatian Magazine. Volume 13, 1835, pp. 5-144 ( digitized version ).
