Philipp von Hutten

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Philipp von Hutten. Oil on canvas. Portrait by an unknown painter (around 1600)

Philipp von Hutten (born December 18, 1505 at Birkenfeld Castle , Lower Franconia ; † probably on May 17, 1546 near today's Cruz de Tara-Tara near Quíbor , Venezuela ) was a German conquistador and explorer who, in the years from 1535 until 1538 took part as a captain in an expedition of the Augsburg Welser Society into the interior of Venezuela to look for gold there. At the end of 1540 he was appointed by Charles V as military commander in chief of the Spanish overseas province of Venezuela, administered by the Welsers. On his way back from a second expedition that Hutten led between 1541 and 1546, his Spanish rival Juan de Carvajal had him murdered.

Life

At the court of Charles V

The young Charles V

Little reliable information is available about the first thirty years of Philip von Hutten's life . It is documented that his parents put him in the care of Count Heinrich III between the ages of twelve and fourteen for page training . von Nassau-Breda-Vianden , who was one of the tutors and closest confidante of the later Habsburg emperor Charles V. Hutten stayed in Spain for several years in the entourage of Charles before he set off with him in 1529 for the coronation of the emperor in Bologna . For the years between 1530 and 1534, his stay at the imperial court in Brussels and Toledo is evidenced by letters addressed to him. However, it remains unclear what exact position Hutten occupied in Karl's entourage.

During Hutten's time in Brussels he had a close relationship with Magdalena von Obritschan, lady-in-waiting for Mary of Castile , a sister of Charles V. We only know of the love between the two through three letters that Magdalena sent to Hutten between 1532 and 1534. It can only be guessed whether Hutten's relative lack of means towards the maid of honor, who came from a wealthy knightly family, was the reason for the failure of a marriage between the two, or whether this even led to Hutten's later decision to seek his fortune in the New World.

The catfish in Venezuela

Bartholomäus Welser the Elder

With his coronation as King of Spain in 1516 as Charles I, he became ruler of an empire "in which the sun never set". The money required to finance this empire - and in particular to secure its emerging overseas region in Central and South America - has exceeded the possibilities of the Spanish crown since the Habsburg-French struggle for hegemony in Europe, which flared up again from 1526 at the latest . For this reason, Charles V made contact with the Augsburg Welser Company - a trading, banking and mining group operating across Europe at the time - with whose capital he hoped to finance the further development of his overseas territories. In 1528, the Spanish crown and the trading house run by Bartholomäus V. Welser (called "the elder") concluded an Asiento in which the Welser Company was transferred to the governorship of the Spanish overseas province of Venezuela . In return for the numerous associated trade advantages, the Welsers committed themselves to further conquering the territory entrusted to them, to building settlements, converting the indigenous natives to the Catholic faith and to building up a regulated administration. As it soon turned out, however, the interests of the Augsburgers were limited to the dogged search for the legendary gold from El Dorado and the extremely lucrative shipping of 4,900 African slaves to America.

Departure to the New World

Inspection of the Welser Armada by Hohermuth von Speyer (right) and Hutten (center) in San Lúcar de Barrameda. Colored drawing by Hieronymus Köler the Elder .

At the end of February 1534 there was a momentous encounter when Hutten in Toledo, Spain, attended the handover of part of Atahualpa's gold treasure to the emperor. This so-called “royal fifth” was presented to Charles V by Hernando Pizarro , brother of the conquistador of Peru Francisco Pizarro . Whether a personal conversation with Pizarro gave the impetus for Hutten's decision to look for happiness in the New World just like him cannot be proven. What is certain is that Hutten was in Toledo on February 27, 1534, the day the gold was handed over, and only a short time later decided to leave for Venezuela.

Hutten crosses the Atlantic on La Santa Trinidad

At the beginning of October 1534, Hutten began his service in Seville as captain of the Welser company. There he equipped himself with new clothes for a period of two years and went to embark in the Spanish port city of Sanlúcar de Barrameda , where several galleons were already at anchor. Together with a troop of around 600 mercenaries and Venezuela's new governor Georg Hohermuth von Speyer on board, the Welser Armada set sail and reached Coro , the then capital of the country , on February 7, 1535 .

In search of El Dorado

Contrary to what had been agreed with the Spanish crown, the Welsers concentrated on the search for the legendary gold country " El Dorado " , which they suspected to be in the Colombian highlands, during their governorship in Venezuela . After his predecessor Ambrosius Dalfinger had already failed in this task, a new expedition headed by Governor Georg Hohermuth von Speyer set out on May 13, 1535 - only one month after his arrival in Coro - to foray into the interior.

Gold-panning Indians

The total of around 400 men, including Philipp von Hutten, approached their destination, the kingdom of the Muisca Indios, in March 1536 with a distance of a few days, but failed in their search for a pass over the Colombian Eastern Cordillera . So Hohermuth and Hutten finally returned to Coro on May 27, 1538 with empty hands and a troop that had melted down to 110 men. Their failure was underlined by the fact that the Muisca empire was reached and plundered from Santa Marta in 1537/38 - almost simultaneously - by a troop of conquistadors under Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada .

After the death of Governor Hohermuth von Speyer on June 11, 1540, Hutten was appointed General Captain of Venezuela and thus military commander-in-chief of the province administered by the Welsers in December of the same year as the successor to Nikolaus Federmann . However, his hope of being appointed governor of Venezuela was not fulfilled. Together with the eldest son Bartholomäus Welser the Elder , Bartholomäus VI. , who had arrived in Coro in February / March 1541 , Philipp von Hutten set out on another expedition inland on August 1 of the same year. In his search for gold, the troops he led of around 200 men (150 of them on horseback) were forced to march back towards the coast after a clash with the Omagua Indians.

Death on the Río Tocuyo

On his march back to Coro , Philipp von Hutten met Juan de Carvajal in the spring of 1546 , who in the meantime had risen to governor through forged papers and, as one of his first official acts , had relocated the Venezuelan capital to the more fertile inland to the Río Tocuyo . But the general situation in the Spanish overseas territories had also changed in the meantime. The Spanish crown had enacted the so-called “New Laws” (Spanish: Leyes Nuevas ) in 1542 to protect the Indians from the conquistadors and, in addition, classified private conquista companies such as that of the Welser as not very useful. At the meeting between Juan de Carvajal and the troop of Philipp von Hutten, there was great tension and Carvajal was almost killed by Bartholomew VI. Welser . At the end of April 1546, however, Carvajal Hutten guaranteed free passage to the coast in a letter of safe conduct. Two weeks after this agreement, probably on Good Friday, first two of Hutten's followers (Gregorio Romero and Diego de Plasencia), then Bartholomew VI. Welser, also known as Bartholomäus Welser the Younger, and finally Hutten attacked and murdered on the march to Coro. According to statements made by the maid Magdalena and the Ayamanes Indian Perio, Philipp von Hutten was buried on a hill above the river bed. On September 16, 1546, Juan de Carvajal was sentenced to death for murder by the governor Juan Pérez de Tolosa, who had now been appointed by Charles V, and the sentence was carried out the following day.

The news of Hutten's death and that of the Welser son did not reach Germany until 1546/47. As a result, Philip's brother Moritz von Hutten and Bartholomäus Welser the Elder tried to provide a complete explanation and punishment of Juan de Carvajal's accomplices, but all initiatives in this regard came to nothing. Their governorship in Venezuela was withdrawn from the Welsern on April 13, 1556 after a ten-year legal battle.

Tradition and meaning of the Hutten letters

Philipp von Hutten and his mission on behalf of the Welser were as good as forgotten until the twentieth century. This changed with an edition of his letters that he began in 1996 and which were considered lost until 1988 and the discovery of which was celebrated as a scientific sensation.

Surprisingly unscathed, part of the Hutten correspondence not only survived the long way across the Atlantic from Coro to Cartagena , the collection point of the Spanish silver fleet, and from there on to Cádiz or Seville , then on horseback to Augsburg and from there to the respective recipients , but also survived storage in family archives for several hundred years. After the Second World War , the letters reached Thuringia and were discovered by the hobby historian and postal historian Hans-Jürgen Salier from Hildburghausen in 1975, and were shown for the first time in an exhibit at philatelic and postal history exhibitions internationally (including in Havana and Toronto). Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, there were contacts with Friedrich Karl von Hutten, the then head of the Hutten House, to whom the letters were handed over in 1990.

After painstaking work, the first of three volumes was published in 1996 by the Bamberg historian Eberhard Schmitt . Beyond the person of Philipp von Hutten, the unique materials enable new insights into the colonial goals of the Welser in Latin America and allow their governorship to appear in a new light. They are philologically significant due to the fact that Hutten uses more than 100 East Franconian expressions that are not known to the Grimm dictionary .

reception

On February 14, 2015, the play Goldland (director: Tobias Ginsburg ), which is about the expeditions of discovery and conquest of the catfish commissioners in Venezuela, premiered.

literature

swell

Representations

  • Jörg Denzer: The Welser in Venezuela. The failure of their economic goals . In: Mark Häberlein, Johannes Burkhardt (Ed.): The Welser. New research on the history and culture of an Upper German trading company . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2002, pp. 285-319, ISBN 3-05-003412-2 .
  • Dietmar Felden: Over the Cordilleras to Bogotá. The journeys of the Welser in Venezuela . Justus Perthes Verlag, Gotha 1997, ISBN 3-623-00353-0 .
  • Konrad Haebler : The overseas enterprises of the Welser and their shareholders . Hirschfeld, Leipzig 1903.
  • Hermann Kellenbenz : Philipp von Hutten and the Welser company in Venezuela . In: Yearbook of the Historical Association Dillingen an der Donau , 15 (1988), pp. 367–384.
  • Hermann Kellenbenz:  Hutten, Philipp. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 10, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1974, ISBN 3-428-00191-5 , p. 99 ( digitized version ).
  • Friedrich Ratzel :  Hutten, Philipp von . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 13, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1881, p. 463 f. (outdated)
  • Eberhard Schmitt, Friedrich Karl von Hutten (ed.): The gold of the new world. The papers of the Welser conquistador and general captain of Venezuela Philipp von Hutten 1534–1541 . 2., rework. Edition Verlag Spitz, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-87061-862-0 .
  • Eberhard Schmitt , Götz Simmer (ed.): Death on Tocuyo. The search for the background to the murder of Philip von Hutten in 1541–1550 . Verlag Spitz, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-87061-863-9 .
  • Gisela Schmitt: Old and New World. The relations of Joachim Camerarius to the conquistador Philipp von Hutten . In: Rainer Kößling , Günther Wartenberg (Ed.): Joachim Camerarius . Narr, Tübingen 2003, pp. 303-335, ISBN 3-8233-5981-9
  • Götz Simmer: Gold and slaves. The province of Venezuela during the Welser administration (1528–1556). Wissenschaft - & - Technik-Verlag, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89685-343-0 .
  • Michael Zeuske : Small History of Venezuela . Beck, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-54772-0 .

Fiction

Web links

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on January 14, 2006 .
personal data
SURNAME Hutten, Philipp von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Welser Conquistador and Imperial General Captain of Venezuela
DATE OF BIRTH December 18, 1505
PLACE OF BIRTH Birkenfeld Castle in the Haßberge Mountains
DATE OF DEATH uncertain: May 17, 1546
Place of death at Cruz de Tara-Tara near Quíbor , Venezuela